Blotter – Embed a Stylish Calendar on Your Mac Desktop

Posted on Sunday, July 10, 2011

Blotter – Wireload – $9.99 (App Store)

iCal has been a staple of the Mac operating system for nearly ten years now. It was introduced in 2002 as part of a secret side project – a team of French coders were hired by Steve Jobs to create a cool Mac application that supported multiple calendars and task management. It hasn’t changed that much over the years, indeed the rather cheesy wooden makeover it has received in OSX Lion is one of its first major ‘refreshes’.

Blotter is a utility for iCal that embeds a week’s calendar right on your desktop. It’s a small install that can be set to run automatically on log-in and takes up very few processor threads while serving up your forthcoming events, appointments and tasks. It is embedded at a desktop level, but cannot be interacted with directly – to change any of the tasks or events you need to fire up iCal.

The on-screen calendar can be displayed in one of three sizes – a slimline narrow version, a half-screen medium sized version and a full-screen mode. In addition the calendar can be positioned in one of nine locations around the desktop according to your own preferences. To move you simply drag the calendar to your preferred location from within the application’s preferences window.

The calendar itself is transparent and thus looks very different according to the desktop wallpaper you’ve chosen to use. In all modes it displays a large date display on the desktop and your upcoming tasks. Forthcoming events on the calendar are colour-coded as per the colour you set within iCal, making it easy to work out which events in your diary relate to which part of your life.

It’s all very well getting organised, but you need to have ready and immediate access to information in order to make the best use of it. My problem is that I often put stuff in iCal and then fail to open iCal to see what’s coming up. Blotter neatly solves this issue, by keeping all your event data front and centre, right there on the desktop. It’s a cool and well designed application that deserves a spot on any iCal user’s desktop.

App Store Freebie of the Week – Text Wrangler

Posted on Monday, July 4, 2011

Sometimes you’ll find the most capable of apps are also the cheapest and Text Wrangler from Bare Bones Software is a case in point. It’s a feature-packed application that can access, modify and save pretty much every text-based format there is. However none of this should come as a surprise because it’s made by the same people that make the illustrious BBEdit – the one text editor to rule them all.

Text Wrangler is a general purpose text editor, a programmer’s or system admin’s text editor and a text manipulator. It includes some incredibly powerful tools, such as grep search/replace, difference & merge and text clean-up. Given how powerful it is, you may be wondering why Bare Bones choose to give this app away when its only real competition is their own paid-for application BBEdit. The answer is that many people don’t need the sort of horsepower BBEdit has all the time. Plus BBEdit includes some other advanced functionality that you don’t get in TextWrangler, such as full blown HTML editing tools, the clippings system and a special font specifically designed to assist coders.

There are numerous instances where an app like TextWrangler can save you hours of painstaking editing. There’s some pretty good case studies on the Bare Bones site that give a good insight into functions such as grep. If you ever need to tweak a text file, alter it in some highly specific way or changes its format – TextWrangler should be your first port of call.

FluffyApp – The small but perfectly formed cloud uploader

Posted on Monday, July 4, 2011

Here’s a turn-around for you. CloudApp is a simple file/link sharing service for the Mac that enables you to share images, links, music, videos and files via a very simple drag-and-drop interface. FluffyApp is a Windows client for this service that operates along similar lines.

Once you’ve installed FluffyApp you’ll see a simple cloud icon in the system tray that serves as the only interface between your stuff and the cloud. To upload anything, you just drag it onto the icon and then a shortcut to that link is copied into the clipboard ready for you to paste into an email, Skype message or whatever.

On CloudApp’s Free plan you can upload 10 files per day up to 25MB per file. There’s some paid-for plans too which enables you to upload as many files as you want as long as no one file exceed 250Mb in size. You can view your uploads at any time on the CloudApp website, where your files will be automatically categorised by type.

App Store Daily Freebie – SoundSource

Posted on Friday, July 1, 2011

Short and sweet one for you today. SoundSource from Audio HiJack and Radioshift developer Rogue Amoeba, is a little menubar utility that enables you to switch your audio input and output sources with a single click or to adjust the volume settings associated with those input and output sources.

SoundSource takes up very little memory space and is absolutely perfect for anyone who needs to switch sound sources reguarly, such as when listening via headphones or outputting to an external sound device. Direct download link from the developer’s website, below.

App Store Daily Freebie – Opus Domini Lite

Posted on Thursday, June 30, 2011

With so many note-taking apps in the app store, you need to do something to stand out. And that’s precisely what the developers of Opus Domini (it loosely translates to Work Master) have done with this cute and free app, which sports a really cool interface.

On the right left of the application’s window are five tabs, which give access to the app’s main functions – daily tasks, master tasks, ‘compass’, goals and mission. The general thrust of these sections is that this app’s more than about planning the week ahead, it’s about setting longterm goals for yourself and seeing them through.

In effect all of the different sections make this a great longterm planning application. You can set repeating tasks, assign goals over a period of weeks or months and track how you’re doing by referring back to those old entries. On the technical side of things, the app has a full search facility and can be password protected should you wish.

Get it

App Store Daily Freebie – Facelet

Posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2011

The biggest website on the planet obviously generates quite a few third party applications – photo-uploaders, editors, page customisers and so on. But the favoured app amongst Facebook users according to download volumes are ready-access apps. These are utilities that sit in the menubar and enable you to view posts, news and pages by just clicking on the icon on the taskbar.

Facelet is a Facebook ready-access app that combines a sleek interface and simple concise access to all the standard Facebook functions. You can post status updates and view recent news from the main window and scroll down through all entries – the interface window is such that nothing feels cramped.

Custom styling has been applied to Facebook sections such as the Friends list, Photos, Events, Notes and Places. Despite the fact that everything’s squeezed into a window just 350pixels wide, nothing feels cramped. So if you’re a regular Facebook using Mac owner, then this smart little freebie’s a no-brainer. Snag it before they realise it’s worth good money.

App Store Daily Freebie – My Diary 2

Posted on Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Here’s a cute little app that’s currently available for free in the Mac App Store. My Diary 2 is a simple application for recording your daily notes in. It’s called a Diary app, but the functionality is such that you can use it for anything that requires some form of date-based record.

The app’s split into a calendar/entry pane on the left and a text pane on the right. I say a text pane because that’s all it is – there’s no option here for dropping graphics of any kind in.

You can choose and style fonts if you want – but that’s all. The text pane also has a text sizing slider which enables you to ramp up or down the text size on the fly for easy-reading.

The calendar pane on the left shows any entries you’ve made for a particular day. You can add multiple entries for each day if you wish. You can also colour code all entries by click on the colour label icon and then filter by that colour code in the left-pane. So for instance you could have ‘work’ entries as red, and so on.

There’s a simple four digit pin-code security option in case you do wish to use this app to record your deepest, darkest thoughts. There’s also a syncing facility for the iPhone/iPad app of the same name and a built-in back-up/restore facility. All in all it’s a simple, unembelished sort of an app that does just one thing – the up-side of that is that’s both very simple and very fast.

Get it

Swackett – a different kind of weather app

Posted on Friday, June 24, 2011

Not only does this app have one of the strangest names ever, but it’s also a fairly ‘out there’ concept. The name can at least be explained as being a contraction of ‘Sweater, Jacket or Coat’, but the concept of this funky weather app, that’ll take a while longer to gestate. What we can tell you is that it’s a weather application that comes in App Store (free) and web application (also free) formats.

So the basic idea of this app is to distil the basic weather information down into something you can glance at quickly and know how you should be dressed before venturing outside the front door. An honourable intention for sure, but it advised this Australian to go outside in a t-shirt and slacks with a maximum temperature of 16c forecast. No offence, Swackett, but I’d freeze my bollocks off.

The actual weather data seems pretty accurate, which is pretty rare when it comes to weather forecasts and this country of Australia. Not sure where they’re getting their data from, but it’s spot on for the most part. The main panel gives you current conditions, today’s forecast, tonight’s forecast and tomorrow’s forecast in funky tabbed format. Scroll down the page and you get separate 14 hour and 7 day outlooks, along with radar and satellite images if they’re available in that area.

Swackett might be a free app, but it’s also one that features in-app advertising in the form of Google adverts. It kind of messes up the otherwise sleek lines of the application, but not to such an extent that you start dragging it towards the ever-loving arms of the trash bin.

CCleaner – cleaning up after Windows

Posted on Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Piriform – Free

Let’s face it – XP is a messy operating system. It’s a bit like a young kid with a lot of toys and a large bedroom. It leaves stuff lying around all over the place, it rarely puts things back where they belong and it isn’t very good at tidying up after itself. XP leaves the digital equivalent of socks and lego all over your hard drive and all that digital detritus slows down your PC and makes it more likely that something will break on your operating system.

Well – if XP’s a messy child, then CCleaner is like its super-efficient mum. It will check your hard drive, search every nook and cranny for crud and then clean it all away with a click of the mouse. It’s one of those brilliant little programs that does one job exceedingly well. If you’re looking to speed up your system or clean up a little hard drive space then CCleaner is the first place you should start.

So what does it tidy up? It’s first line of attack is Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s web browsers leaves behind a mountain of useless crap – from old cached files to cookies you don’t even need. It then goes after the Explorer, cleaning out the clipboard, temporary files and even the run history. Finally it searches for things like the CHKDSK fragments left behind when XP’s done repairing your hard drive. And when it’s finished looking, you can click one button to flush all that crud down the digital pan.

The registry comes in for a similar deep-cleansing. Having analysed your registry for long-deleted applications and other remnants, it will offer to back up your changes before it deletes them (always a good idea). Then your registry is flushed and your computer can boot up and operate that little bit quicker. CCleaner is worthy of being a permanent fixture in the Utilities section of any Windows user’s start menu.

Radioshift – the radio player and recorder for Mac

Posted on Tuesday, June 21, 2011

If you’ve got the attention span of a goldfish and therefore don’t notice the fact that your local radio station only owns a collection of 10 records, then Internet radio is probably going to be of no use to you. But for those of us who have non-mainstream tastes and/or like listening to something other than the local Flacid FM, then Internet radio is a god-send.

I’m an Internet radio junkie. This is partly because I live in Australia, a country that has just one half-decent radio station (Triple J) but which unfortunately champions rock music – which I’m not the biggest fan of. Anyway – I like listening to Internet radio – specifically the BBC, but also good chillout or dance stations. Up until recently however I had to restrict that listening to those times when I was sat in front of my PC. Not anymore though – thanks to RadioShift I can listen to all my favourite shows whenever I want.

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The best way of thinking about RadioShift is as a PVR for your Internet Radio. It can tap into the listing pages, show you the schedule for the coming day, and let you subscribe to anything that takes your fancy. So if you want to wake up to a news bulletin every day for instance, you can subscribe with a single click of the mouse. Since the partnership with TuneIn Radio (the famous iPhone app), listings are now far better and you can actually search directly for individual programs rather than just radio shows.

Like many Mac programs, RadioShift is beautifully designed and very easy to use. The main interface enables you to search or browse for stations and shows. When you find something you like the sound of, you click the subscribe button, check the details and add it your list of shows. The radio shows you record can be listened to from within RadioShift, or you can click a button to transfer them over to iTunes, where they can be transferred to your iPod in the same way that you do with podcasts.

Since installing RadioShift I’ve been enjoying all my favourite shows, on tap, in my car using my iPod. It’s great being liberated from lousy local radio stations and their identikit playlists. If you’re suffering from poor radio output in your area, give RadioShift a go.

Driveimage XML

Posted on Tuesday, June 21, 2011

I think that there’s an on-going issue in the wonderful world of software. People are using programs that are far too complicated for their needs. Part of this has been brought on by rampant piracy of programs such as Photoshop, but it’s not the whole picture. Creating a back-up of a hard drive is a case in point. Many people use Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image which have, over successive ‘upgrades’ turned into bloated monsters, when the reality is that an application like DriveImage XML is probably far better suited to their needs.

There are two kinds of drive backup. First, there’s the spur-of-the-moment type when you’re reinstalling your operating system, or the drive’s making funny noises, or you suddenly realise that it’s over 18 months since you backed up. Second there’s the scheduled type when your data is backed up diligently every day or week to a reliable external drive. The problem is most of us are still spur-of-the-moment backer-uppers, due in part to the over-complicated design of drive cloning tools like Ghost.

First things first – DriveImageXML is free to home users. Because it’s free, Runtime Software who produced the program will not support it. But that’s no biggy, because DriveImage is simplicity itself. To back-up your software, you simply choose the source drive, then the destination for the backup files and set it going. Restoring is similarly easy, just browse to the location of the backup and hit the Restore button. And if you only want to retrieve certain files or folders from your backup? No problem – just browse the backup archive, select the files you wish to restore and browse to where you want them saved. If you want to complete a full clone from backup to a new drive, then the Drive-to-Drive option is all you’ll need. About the only thing that DriveImage doesn’t do, that Ghost does – is incremental backups. And it does all this for absolutely no wonga at all – whereas Ghost costs $70.

Don’t let DriveImage’s simple interface fool you – underneath the surface is a very powerful tool. For instance, DriveImage utilises Volume Shadow Services which means that you can clone a drive even if you’re sat there using it at the time. Moreover the XML design of the program makes it far more flexible than something like Ghost, because it doesn’t use a proprietary file format. And if you want to make use of regular scheduled back-ups, then you can use the Task Scheduler to get things up and running.

Distraction Free Mac Writing Apps – Roundup

Posted on Thursday, June 16, 2011

There has been something of a backlash against bloated writing software. Not so long ago you had a couple of options when it came to writing on the Mac – you could use one of the big box brand name word processors (such as Word or Pages) or you could fire up a basic text editor (such as BBEdit or TextEdit). Neither of these options was particularly adequate.

Thankfully a new breed of writing tool has burst onto the scene in the form of the distraction-free editor. These applications strip everything down to its basics and concentrate on the simple act of actually writing. Formating of text is largely ignored, menu-bars are banished, all uncessary embellishment is discarded.

For the purposes of this round-up we’ve decided to take a look at three of the better distraction-free writing tools available for the Mac. They are iA Writer, ByWord and OmmWriter.

iA Writer – App Store – $21.99

If you’re like me, then one of the first things you do after installing some software is to have a poke around inside the application’s preferences window. Well don’t bother looking for that in iA Writer because it doesn’t exist – what you see is what you get. There are some options you can toggle on and off in the menubar, but that’s about as sophisticated as it gets.

iA Writer employs a clean, paperlike writing surface in the default full-screen mode. Words are incredibly clear and crisp and stand out beautifully against this background. Nothing else is displayed in the text window – no word or character counts, no file information – nothing. It’s only once you [escape] out of full-screen mode that you can see a word and character count and also (interestingly) a suggested reading time indicator.

This minimalist white work environment is further enhanced by the software’s innovative Focus Mode. In Focus Mode, only the sentence that you are currently working in is displayed at full opacity – all your previous sentences are greyed out. This enables you to concentrate on the words you’re currently writing and not stress too much about the ones that went before. This means that you spend less time flitting backwards and forwards through your text changing things and more time actually writing. It’s a great system that works brilliantly.

iA Writer utilises its own very basic form of markup. Put asterisks around some words to make them bold, make a header by put an asterisk and then a space in front of the words. Ultimately this is all you need to work on your text – you can worry about things like fonts and graphic embellishments once you’ve actually finished writing. After years of horrendous Microsoft interfaces I must say I found this writing environment to be near-on perfect, but it is worth noting that it’s three times the price of OmmWriter.

OmmWriter – App Store – $5.99

While iA Writer takes the spartan distraction-free environment to its limits, OmmWriter actively seeks to enhance your mindset. It can be set up in a very similar way – plain white with clear black text – but offers more options. The fonts, while looking very crisp are not, however, as clean as iA Writer’s and look slightly bitmapped. Moreover, several font sizes are offered to enable you to customise the environment to the size of your screen. You can also choose a simple sans serif font, a serif font, an old-school script font or a blocky courier style font.

OmmWriter makes a couple of minor concessions to the interface, but these remain hidden until you move the mouse. When you do move the mouse you’ll see a configurable text entry box, a word count and some icons placed on the right side of the window. The size of the text box can be altered to cater for your personal requirements – some people like to write in smaller column based layouts, others prefer wider text windows – you can use either. You can also alter the height of the text entry window meaning you can have a traditional paged based layout or a very slimline paragraph based look.

When you first start OmmWriter, the splash screen advises you that it is best enjoyed with headphones on. Surely this is the first case of a text editor making such a claim? The reason for this is that the software comes with a selection of ambient sound environments that are designed to help isolate your brain and let you concentrate on the matter in hand. While I’m happy to work with the right kind of music in the background, none of these sonic environments did much for me – however if I was in a busy office I’d probably have a very different opinion. There’s also a configurable keystroke sound that I personally found very distracting and turned off immediately.

To complement the sonic soundscapes, OmmWriter also includes several page environments beyond the default plain white paper look. There’s a barren white snowscape, a dark grey textured cloth, a light spring green abstract look and even one that cycles gently through a pastel palette of colours. If you find all these settings a bit distracting (or, you know, pretentious) then you can simply turn them off.

ByWord – App Store – $12.99

Lying somewhere between the design and features of iA Writer and OmmWriter, ByWord incorporates features of both these other apps. It has a preferences window for a start, but there’s so little in there that you do wonder why they didn’t just use a toggled on-screen options layout.

There are two colour schemes – Light and (yes, you’ve guessed it) Dark. Use of either is, of course, a personal preference but I found the dark screen a bit too imposing and quickly switched to the light paper-styled option. Unlike iA Writer and OmmWriter you can also use any font you have installed on your system. After a bit of experimentation I switched from the built-in fonts (Cochin, Courier and Georgia) to Helvetica Neue with a nice big 18point font size.

There’s an implementation of iA Writer’s Focus Mode in ByWord but it doesn’t work nearly as well. You can pick the size of the focus from one to nine lines in length, a paragraph or completely off.  I definitely preferred iA Writer’s sentence mode. Also ByWord faded out the non-focused text that little bit too much so that if you did want to quickly glance back at a previous paragraph you practically had to squint.

ByWord includes some basic text formatting options which are accessed either from the menubar or from a popover window. Neither of these worked very well for me and smacked of the old word processor. However the main problem I had with ByWord was that text eventually sank to the bottom of the page and there was no way of moving it to the more comfortable centre eyeline position without sticking a load of carriage returns in.

Windows Screen Grabbers

Posted on Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Not so long ago you had very few options when it came to screen grabs on Windows and most of those were rubbish. When I was reviewed software for PC magazines I usually plumped for something old school like Paintshop Pro. However things have changed and, perhaps spurred on by the veritable glut of such utilities available on the Mac platform, there are now some terrific and free options. For the purposes of this article I’m going to look at two of the best screen grab tools – Screenpresso and Greenshot. Both programs enable you to perform sophisticated screen grabs that capture precisely the area of the desktop you require.

Screenpresso – LearnPulse

Screenpresso comes in free and ‘pro’ versions. The differences between the two mainly pertain to the uploading of screenshots or screen videos to online services like YouTube. You can still upload to these sites, but the software will brand your video – upgrade to Pro to remove them. Hitting the Print key (or PrtScrn depending on your keyboard) brings up Screenpresso’s crosshairs – you can either click once to screenshot just an active window or hold down the mouse button and drag the crosshairs out to grab just a specific region. An on-screen loupe enables you to precisely line up your screen grabs. Images captured are then immediately placed in the application’s library and can be saved out in a variety of formats (including alpha enabled PNG and PDF), copied to the clipboard, printed, renamed or uploaded to all the main library sites (Flickr, Imgur, YouTube etc) or alternatively to Twitter, Facebook or Evernote. It’s all very comprehensive and means you can use just one application to grab, edit and upload your images.

The editor in Screenpresso is a minimalist but very effective effort. You can speech bubbles and arrows to annotate the image or highlight areas in dayglo green. If you’re taking grabs of password entry screens or simply wish to obscure something you can use a simple blur tool to disguise them. In the Image tab of the screen editor you can crop or resize the image, modify the canvas size or apply some tasteful effects such as  reflections and torn edges.

Greenshot – GPL

Unlike Screenpresso, Greenshot is an open source application created and maintained by enthusiast coders. As anyone who’s a Linux distro will know that isn’t a bad thing either. What it does mean is that this will always be free and there won’t be any special pro editions. It performs the same functions as Screenpresso but, it must be said, it’s considerably less polished. It can grab selections, windows or full screens using the usual hotkeys. As soon as you’ve taken a screenshot, the image is shown in the application’s own editing window. From there you can either modify it or save it.

The image editor in Greenshot is far less capable than Screenpresso’s. Yes it does all the same basic things such as blurs, arrows and text boxes, but it’s much clunkier and the end results look a bit rough. The editor also lacks the upload capabilities of Screenpresso, so once you have your annotated image ready to go you’ll have to save it somewhere and upload it manually. While it’s not something we were concerning ourselves with for the nature of this review it is worth adding that Screenpresso also has some advanced screen movie capture capabilities that Greenshot lacks.

iProcrastinate – Do or do not… there is no try

Posted on Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Craig Otis – Free – App Store

One of the most popular forms of utility available on the App Store are ‘To Do’ programs. These appeal to anyone who’s trying to get better organised. They have the allure of software from the early days of computing, when home PCs promised to revolutionise our lives and transform our daily chores. iProcrastinate is the latest in a long line of pretenders, but where other to-do apps only made organisation more complicated, this app truly simplifies proceedings – best of all, it’s free.

The interface is clean and instantly understandable. You’ve got your categories on the left, your items in the middle and the itemised breakdown on the right. You begin by setting broad subject areas, such as school or work. Then you add a task to one of these subject areas and pick a deadline for it. You can then break the task down further by adding as many individual steps as you want and back these up with any files needed to do the task. You won’t need a manual or an instructional video to use this software.

To gain a quick and clear overview of your workload, click on the Calendar button to see a monthly view of your tasks. Cleverly this is not a calendar month, but two weeks either side of today’s date. Recurring items can be easily added and you can assign varying levels of importance to each task.

Like all great apps, iProcrastinate hides its true sophistication behind a veil of simplicity. You can store  your database in your Dropbox and access it remotely. Spring a dollar for the iPhone app and you can sync to your iPhone too. Or just enjoy the flexibility of the free Mac application. However you use it, this application comes highly recommended.

Little Snapper

Posted on Monday, June 13, 2011

RealMac Software – $29.99 – App Store

Surely one of the most under-rated screen capture utilities on the Mac platform – Little Snapper offers a number of key features that set it apart from the crowd. Produced by the team behind the RapidWeaver website development software, Little Snapper looks unasuming, but packs a punch.

Like all good screen capture apps, Little Snapper can be operated via its icon in the menu bar or using a configurable hotkey. Images taken are stored in the apps own library for tagging and archival purposes. Images can be directly uploaded to RealMac’s own file depository (called Ember) or to Flickr. This being a Mac application you can also simply drag and drop screenshots from the library into whatever application you’re using at the time.

The library is a fully functioning and flexible storage facility for all the screenshots you take. Images can be tagged using any custom tags you choose and added to user-configurable collections. Combine all this with a swift search facility and you’ll be able to locate any screenshot from the library quickly and easily.

Without a doubt though, Little Snapper’s best features are its screen capturing capabilities. Unlike the over-rated Skitch, Little Snapper can take a screen capture of any active window on your desktop, complete with that sexy drop shadow. Just select Snap Window and click on the window you’d like to capture and it will isolate it beautifully. It also includes area captures using crosshairs, full screen captures and timed captures. The website capture facility is particularly advanced, enabling you to easily capture a long webpage with a single click.

Once you’ve grabbed a window it is automatically placed in the library and you can then annotate it. Text can be blurred quickly and easily,  the grab can be cropped, boxes, circles and lines can be added, arrows can be placed and, of course, text boxes can be placed on the image.

At the last count there were eight screen capture utilities in the App Store. All the better ones (Skitch, Voila and Little Snapper) come in at or around the $30 mark. However only Voila comes close to the ease of use and feature-set on offer in Little Snapper. Anyone needing to regularly capture screenshots of applications or websites will find its interface, features and price point hard to get past.