Entries Tagged 'Free Friday' ↓

The interface to iChat (especially versions before Leopard) can be clunky, and sometimes you want to use chat services other than the few supported by iChat.  Luckily, there are other good alternatives.  One of my favorites has always been Adium.

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Ok, I’ll admit it: I love mail.  Even if it’s mail that I know is coming, it’s fun to anticipate delivery of packages I’ve ordered, and December is certainly a big season for package deliveries in my family since we’ve all discovered the convenience of on-line shopping.

Whether you just like to watch your package’s route as it winds its way to you, or you need to make sure that the kids don’t grab the mail on days gifts are scheduled to arrive, or you just don’t want to miss an important package delivery while you’re at work, on-line package tracking can be a real benefit.  It gets even easier with Mike Piontek’s Delivery Status Dashboard Widget.

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Monitor size is increasing, and so is the amount of stuff displayed on the monitor at any given time. With all that cluttered space, I often lose track of my mouse pointer and end up flailing the mouse around wildly until I happen to catch sight of the little arrow flying through my peripheral vision. Frustrating, but easily solvable with a handy little application from 2Point5Fish.com called Mouse Locator.

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Happy (day after) Thanksgiving! Thanks have been given, the turkey’s been eaten, and the day that heralds the official start of the “Holiday Season” has come and gone. Many thanks to all of the Unseemly Raptor readers for your interest, comments, emails, and questions. I love hearing from all of you.

Kick off the holiday season by counting down to Christmas with Kevin Craft’s Christmas Countdown Widget. Starting at the end of November, decorations are added to the tree until you reach December 25th as your dashboard grows ever more festive.

With the introduction of Leopard, Apple has given users an easy to use, no need to think about it way to do backups with Time Machine. It’s slick, and I think people will actually use it. However, with that said, there’s not really any reason for Time Machine to become the only piece of your backup repertoire.

If you haven’t upgraded yet, you’ll probably want to make a backup of your important data before switching to Leopard (it’s always a good idea to back data up before making major changes to your computer), and even if you already have Time Machine crunching away at your files, it’s still a good idea to have periodic backups for your backups. The external drive that Time Machine uses is just as fallible as the one in the computer you’re using it to back up, so you’d hate to have that drive go belly up and still be without your backup.  Having another backup that’s not stored in Time Machine and connected to your computer all the time also ensures that nothing that could wipe out your system will take down both your computer and all of your backups.

Let’s face it: stuff happens. The more ways you back up your most important information, the better! But, if you’ve already spent money on Time Machine and external drives, you’re probably asking, “Ok, how much more will this cost me?” You want another way to back up data, but it should be cheap, reliable, and easy to use. Enter, SuperDuper from Shirt-Pocket Software. It’s more than just a cute name!

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Windows - not the first word you’d expect to see on a Mac blog. The fact of the matter is, if you’re looking for video media, most of it will be on YouTube or Google Video, but you’re probably still going to run across some .wma or .wmv files that aren’t going to play on your Mac without some tweaking because Microsoft no longer produces Windows Media Player for Mac. Thanks to Telestream, you can install their Flip4Mac Quicktime plug-in, and play .wma and .wmv players in Quicktime, or by using Quicktime in Safari.

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Computers are full of shiny things that beg for our attention - new emails popping up, Google searches itching to be executed, chat windows popping up as people sign on and off messaging clients, or simply just colorful icons, backgrounds, desktop images pulling your attention this way and that. This can lead to distractions when trying to focus yourself on the task at hand (or contribute to the Unseemly Raptor column not being finished at midnight).

You could close all of your applications, set your desktop image to a boring color, and work to block out everything sitting in the dock…but there are instances where you might want your applications out of sight but still running, whether it’s because you want to be able to switch focus back and forth without continually opening and closing things, you have data crunching in the background, or you want to have other applications open but less prominent. In this case, you may just want to Think.

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I do a lot of image editing on my Mac, and I’ve spent many happy hours with PhotoShop. However, sometimes using PhotoShop for a little task is like cracking an egg with a sledgehammer - just a bit of overkill.

When I need to do some quick and simple image manipulation, I usually turn instead to the tiny, free editor: ImageWell. It’s lightweight and functional like a widget, but a powerful desktop app. If you ever need to make a small crop here, add a spot of text there, or maybe make an image a circle instead of a square, all without the hoopla of launching a large image package stuffed with features - this is one application you’ll definitely want in your bag of tricks.

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On Monday, I talked about various ways to take screenshots in OS X. I have to admit, I’ve been holding one back on you. Both Grab and the screenshot keystroke techniques are useful, but they do have their limitations. You need to remember keystrokes, or go find Grab and open it, you have to be willing to use .png images, etc.

My all-time favorite screenshot technique is actually a Dashboard widget called Screenshot Plus.

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If you’re like me, you have bits and pieces of information: dates, names, to-do lists…little things here and there that are so small that they’re not worth writing down because you’re positive you can just remember them. 30 seconds later you’ve forgotten it and are cursing yourself for not having jotted it down after all.

I have this problem with my computer, too. Files, email addresses, little images - things that I’m not going to need for very long, so it hardly seems worth opening and saving a document to keep them. Before I know it, I’ve lost track of whatever it was again and am stuck going back to where I saw it the first time to look at it again, copy it back to the clipboard, what have you. Continue reading →