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The mystery of AOL Desktop

Infinite Loop reviews the newly released AOL Desktop for Mac, and tries to puzzle out why it was ever created. They say they want to “re-engage” with Mac users. It’s nice of them to try, at least.

[ Posted May 12, 2008 in ]

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Apps in the dock
Yet another Bean fan
Faint praise for Pastor

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Apps in the dock

Macworld’s Mac Gems column has so much cool freeware that you might as well just subscribe to the feed. The latest is called AppMenuBoy, a tiny app that sits in the dock for easy access to all your programs. Why not just put your applications folder in the dock? You could, but the problem is that you get all the files and documents that come with it. With AppMenuBoy, it the apps and only the apps.

[ Posted May 2, 2008 in ]

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The mystery of AOL Desktop
Yet another Bean fan
Faint praise for Pastor

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Yet another Bean fan

The freeware word processor Bean has been getting a lot of traction lately. Likely it’s because, contrary to what you might think, there aren’t very many free word processors out there for the Mac. The only other ones that come to mind are the minimalist TextEdit, which comes free with your Mac, and AbiWord, which attempts to match the features (and unfortunately some of the bloat) of Microsoft Word. Bean throws in some extras, but manages to remain svelte. And besides, it reminds us of coffee and Mr. Bean — how cool is that!

[ Posted Apr 30, 2008 in ]

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The mystery of AOL Desktop
Apps in the dock
Faint praise for Pastor

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Faint praise for Pastor

The good news is that Macworld has declared longtime thriftmac favourite Pastor to be a Mac Gem. The bad news is that this nifty little password database only gets three and a half mice out of five. As far as we’re concerned, Pastor rocks. And don’t get us started on Keychain . . .

[ Posted Apr 29, 2008 in ]

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The mystery of AOL Desktop
Apps in the dock
Yet another Bean fan

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Freeware heist

Lifehacker has a list of freeware alternatives to some of the apps offered at a discount in the MacHeist bundles. As they say, MacHeist is a great value, but you can’t beat free.

[ Posted Apr 17, 2008 in ]

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The mystery of AOL Desktop
Apps in the dock
Yet another Bean fan

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Adobe joins the fray

Quicktime and Windows Media Player now have new competition: the free Adobe Media Player. It’s based on Flash technology and there’s already a bunch of content available for it. Macworld has an introduction and a first look.

[ Posted Apr 9, 2008 in ]

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The mystery of AOL Desktop
Apps in the dock
Yet another Bean fan

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Four stars for Thunderbird

If you’re getting huge volumes of e-mail, Apple’s Mail may be lacking in the tools you need to manage it. Enter Thunderbird 2, with support for tagging, saved searches, and online mail services. Macworld has the review.

[ Posted Apr 8, 2008 in ]

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The mystery of AOL Desktop
Apps in the dock
Yet another Bean fan

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Clash of the clipboards

The ability to copy and paste from one application to another was one of the great wonders of the Mac back in the ’90s. But here we are in a new millennium with a spiffy new OS but the same creaky old clipboard. At the very least, the ability to copy more than one item should be built in. But it’s not. So off we go on a freeware safari.

The contenders

I downloaded the following programs for testing: Clipper, Jumpcut, KoolClip and PTHPasteboard. Strangely enough, after downloading Clipper (which is getting long in the tooth but still works) I noticed the release of a new multi-clipboard program called, coincidentally, Clipper. So, what the hey, I added it to the mix.

The two Clippers, Jumpcut and Koolcut have one thing in common: they all put an icon in the menu bar that creates a list of your recently copied text. From there you can choose an item and paste it where you like. PTHPasteboard works in a similar manner except that it uses a floating panel.

Old Clipper

The most minimal of all would have to be the old Clipper. About the only features are the ability to control how many items are in the list and the ability to clear them all. The catch is that you have to first choose the item you want (which places a checkmark beside it) then use Command-V to paste it.

New Clipper

The new Clipper also requires you to choose before you paste and lacks a quick way to clear the menu. The preferences are a little more extensive, with the ability to set the number of characters in the title and the ability to set the length of time it takes to pull an item from the clipboard. It’s not clear, though, why use would want to increase this time.

KoolClip

KoolClip expands on the features of the two Clippers, perhaps at the expense of desired simplicity — although it too requires that you choose before you paste. A search function is handy if you have many items or you’re not sure which one has what you’re looking for. You can also freeze items — a great idea if you want them for recurring future use. You can also quickly clear all the items. If one of your items is a URL, KoolClip will allow you to preview the HTML page when the URL is selected. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get this feature to work. You can also customize eight hotkeys.

Jumpcut

Jumpcut is the only menu bar-based app that pastes items straight into a document as you choose them. From my point of view this is a big improvement, although others may not like this behaviour. The cool thing about Jumpcut is what is known as the sticky bezel. If you click control-option-V (or some other other hotkey of your choosing), a transparent overlay will appear. You can then use the arrow keys to go through the clipboard items and hit return when you find the one you want.

PTHPasteboard

PTHPasteboard may not be so much freeware as crippled shareware. The free program is the same as the paid program, but you get prominent notices letting you know that certain features are not available unless you pay. This is fair enough — we all have to make a living. Some people, though, might find it inelegant.

The program itself is invoked from a preference panel that is installed for you. You can choose how a floating panel of copied items appears and behaves. I liked having it slide in from the right side of the screen much as the same as thriftmac favourite Sidenote. Once it pops out, you find the item you want and click to insert.

The final word

In the end, I chose Jumpcut as best fitting my needs. It has all the simplicity of Clipper (old and new), plus it inserts items as they are chosen — something not even KoolClip with its extra features can do. I also prefer going to the menu bar for my copied items rather than invoking PTHPasteboard’s floating (or sliding) panel.

More information

Clipper (old)
Clipper (new)
Jumpcut
KoolClip
PTHPasteboard

Update

Another one well worth looking at is ClipMenu. It has all the things I like about Jumpcut, plus a slew of extra features accessible via the preferences so they don’t clutter the menu. Unfortunately the developer’s page is in Japanese so unless you know the language you’ll be left to puzzle out how it works yourself.

ClipMenu (The download link is at the bottom of the page.)

[ Posted Mar 15, 2008 in ]

POSSIBLY RELATED
The mystery of AOL Desktop
Apps in the dock
Yet another Bean fan

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All your bookmarks all the time

Macworld UK has a review of AllBookmarks, which is a nifty way to keep track of bookmarks in all your browsers. Anyone who has jumped between Safari, Camino, Firefox and so forth, knows how easy it can be to have bookmarks in some browsers but not others.

With AllBookmarks, you get a book-shaped icon in the menu bar that gives you access via a menu and submenus to the bookmarks in all your browsers. Clicking on a bookmark will open it in your default browser.

In addition, you can use it with 1Password, a great shareware program that automatically fills in forms for you.

The Macworld review complains about the “indeciperable logic” behind the sorting of the bookmarks, but I found the logic to be perfectly normal and easy to follow.

All in all, we liked AllBookmarks so much that we’ve added it to the thriftmac collection in the Internet category.

[ Posted Feb 28, 2008 in ]

POSSIBLY RELATED
The mystery of AOL Desktop
Apps in the dock
Yet another Bean fan

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Pengupop vs. Snood

Snood has been a longtime favourite here at thriftmac headquarters, going back to at least the mid-‘90s. So you can imagine that we have never considered the thriftmac collection to be complete without a freeware equivalent of this game.

It has always seemed to us that it should be fairly easy to create a Snood-like clone. You have a little shooter at the bottom that places various shapes inside a grid above. Get three or more of the same touching each other, and they fall down. Clear them all off before they advance to the bottom and you win.

So we got a little bit excited when we stumbled across a game called Pengupop. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for our high hopes to be turned into disappointment.

The first thing I noticed was that the download size, at 4.5 MB, was more than twice as big as those for the Windows and Linux versions. I not sure why, but this always makes me suspicious about the coding bloat used to create a Mac version of what was likely originally a Windows game. But what the hey — in these days of broadband connections, it’s not that big a deal.

So I get the game on the desktop and guess what? It’s a generic icon! I took this to be a bad omen. How much effort did they put into the Mac version anyway?

Fortunately, the actual game graphics, while not as sharp as you might like, are for the most part pretty good. The penguin mascot is cute, and the shooter and the orbs have a fair bit of polish to them. And — just like with Snood — you clear the orbs by grouping three or more.

But then come the nagging shortcomings. The field of play isn’t as wide as the one in Snood, so there is less challenge to clearing it. You have to use the arrow keys (rather than the mouse) to aim the shooter, which wouldn’t be so bad except that the shooter isn’t exactly a precision instrument. It seems impossible to get those orbs just where you want them.

In the end, it looks like our search for the Holy Grail of a free version of Snood will have to continue. We can’t really recommend Pengupop as a Snood alternative, although it might be fun for the kids to play with.

If you’re still thinking you might like to try Pengupop, get it here. If you don’t mind shelling out $20, get the venerable Snood over here. They’ve actually got version 4 in beta.

[ Posted Feb 16, 2008 in ]

POSSIBLY RELATED
The mystery of AOL Desktop
Apps in the dock
Yet another Bean fan

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