A side of notes
One of my favourite Mac freeware apps of all time is Sidenote. It runs in the background, with the only evidence of its existence being a two-pixel-wide strip on the side of the monitor ready to be hovered so it can slide out for your note-taking pleasure.
It piqued my curiosity, needless to say, when I discovered there is a competitor to Sidenote called SlidePad. It, too, hides on the side of the monitor. And it, too, can be made to slide into view when you want to jot a note.
It didn’t take much testing, though, to discover that SlidePad falls short in both features and implementation. Let me count the ways:
1. Viewing: With Sidenote, you move your mouse to the side of the screen (which side is your choice) and the app slips into view. You also use a keyboard shortcut, which by default is control-D. It’s reassuring also to have that sliver of white on the side so you know it’s there.
SlidePad can also be brought out from your choice of sides with a mouse move, but it then stays out and can only be put away with a keyboard shortcut — option-Space (or by clicking on a menu item). And when it’s hidden, it’s hidden — no clues exist to its whereabouts.
2. Icons: SlidePad runs like any other program with an icon in the dock and menus you can click in the menu bar.
Sidenote has none of that — just the aforementioned sliver of white, the height of which can be configured. It truly is a background app that gets out of your way.
3. Options: Sidenote allows you to print, email and export your notes. You can add an image via a screen capture service. You can categorize your notes with colour coding — although I would like to see an option for naming the categories.
SlidePad also exports and prints, but there is no option for email. As with Sidenote, you can drag and drop an image, but but there is no facility for screenshots. The one advantage I could find is that it allows you to reorder your notes.
4. Development: Sidenote has been without support for the past few months as the developer finishes his thesis. Pierre Chatel says that will be done this month, so we’re hoping Sidenote will soon be back on track.
SlidePad appears to be a giveaway designed to draw attention to shareware offered by Dare to be Creative. This is not a bad idea and raises hopes that features will be added to make it more compelling.
For now, Sidenote is the clear winner. But competition is a good thing, and Dare to be Creative has many good programs, including the well-received MainMenu — so we have high expectations.
Posted Wednesday, January 6, 2010 in Reviews
Magic Mouse learns new tricks
As I suspected, more programs are on the way to add functionality to Apple’s Magic Mouse. The latest is MagicPrefs, which sports a nice interface for assigning actions to clicks and taps with one to four fingers. It also lets you set the tap sensitivity, which is a good idea. And to top it off, you can dial up the mouse’s tracking speed, which addresses a common complaint.
MagicPrefs now clocks in at version 1.1, but it still has a long way to go. Three-finger click, four-finger click and three-finger tap all do a good job of invoking Exposé in its various forms. The others, including an interesting one-finger middle axis click, are a bit sketchy. Or, as noted with an asterisk, “potentially hard to use.”
Still, I like the direction this app is taking. It’s super simple to set up and use, and has lots of handy features. For example, you can now save presets for your various needs. Gaming, anyone? Also, you can turn on real-time graphical display to see on the screen where exactly you’re clicking and tapping.
The tough part, as with similar apps, is getting everything to work smoothly. While it’s nice to have a way to tap out Exposé from your mouse, it’s not so nice to have your desktop unexpectedly appear because of an accidental tap or click. Prediction: The first developer to get it all totally right will have a hit on their hands.
Posted Monday, December 7, 2009 in Reviews
A merry freeware Christmas
Festive freeware seems a bit slow in arriving this year, but we were able to find three that should bring Christmas cheer to your Mac:
Xmas Mail Stationery provides a template for Apple’s Mail app with a Christmas theme. You’ll need Leopard or Snow Leopard to make it work. It’s a nice addition to the stationery pre-installed in Mail since Apple doesn’t provide anything specific to the holiday season. I found installation a bit of a chore, though. According to the instructions, the file can be placed in one of two folders. The first one didn’t exist and the second one didn’t work. I wound up creating my own folder with the appropriate path and it worked fine.
By the way, the photos can easily be changed with drag and drop — just like other stationery.
Update: More Christmas stationery is available from aMac Island. This package includes six themes, and is much easier to install.
Festive Lights is one of the more amazing widgets I’ve come across, featuring a slew of options and almost endless customizations — all so you can cheer yourself up from time to time with some Christmas lights in the dashboard. Installation, as with any widget, was a snap. What was not apparent at first was the tiny “tag” hanging from the top left with an “i” in the middle of it. Yes, this is where you click to set patterns, speeds and colours for your lights. You can even download various lightsets that other people have created or make your own. And if you’d like to display them on the desktop — well, there’s an app for that.
That little tag on the left is where the magic happens. This shows the widget with the maple leaf lightset installed.
Jubilee screensaver creates mesmerizing abstractions of holidays lights ranging from subtle to vivid. Just double-click to install, then test it in System Preferences the way you would any other screensaver. Clicking on the Options button gives you a choice of four themes: Vivid rainbow hues, Chanukah cool blue and white, natural unadulterated glow, and creepy Christmas-Halloween mashup.
I actually prefer the Chanukah theme, but I couldn’t get a screenshot of it.
So there you have it — three freeware apps to make merry with your Mac.
Posted Friday, December 4, 2009 in Reviews
Has iStat Menus met its match?
iStat Menus has a lot going for it. It keeps track of what your system is doing with nifty little graphics in the menu bar: CPU usage, memory usage, disk usage and activity, network bandwidth, and temperature sensors. Configuration is neatly tucked away in a preference pane, and as a bonus you get highly configurable date and time for the menu bar. Best of all, it’s freeware.
Could anything be better?
We recently discovered a program called atMonitor, which covers pretty much everything iStat Menus does, then goes a lot further. The same system activities are monitored in the menu bar, plus a few others can be added. If you don’t like a cluttered menu bar, you can opt for a floating window, which nicely displays system activities in graphs that update horizontally. Icons for the three most active apps are shown on top.
But that’s not all. A “top” window lists all the process in order of activity — not just the apps you’re familiar with but also background stuff with arcane names such as fontd and pboard. When you click on one of the names, information is displayed in large area above — including a description from iusethis. A tool bar allows you to renice, signal, pause or kill the process.
So is atMonitor better than iStat Menus?
In some ways, yes. There are a lot more options and features, some of which I haven’t touched on here — priorities, triggers and logging among them. You can even download themes or change the colours. On the other hand, atMonitor is not quite as polished as iStat Menus, and you do need to have it running in the dock like any other program. In fact, this may be atMonitor’s greatest drawback — iStat Menus is more discreet. For example, while iStat Menus may not have a floating window, you can get a similar effect by clicking on its menu bar graphs to see more detail.
The verdict
Since both programs are free, why not use both? Keep iStat Menus running for your everyday needs. It’s unobtrusive, attractive and covers the basics. Fire up atMonitor when you really want to puzzle out those processes with your undivided attention.
Posted Wednesday, November 4, 2009 in Reviews
Is this the successor to Quicksilver?
Quicksilver, along with Adium, stands head and shoulders above other free Mac apps in terms of popularity. Power users have discovered ways to bend Quicksilver to their will, so that it does a ton of stuff without their fingers ever leaving the keyboard. And even if you’re not a power user, the basic functionality has a lot to offer.
But lately, Quicksilver has gone through a few rough spots that have raised doubts about its future. Its main developer, Nicholas Jitkoff, has left. An update for Snow Leopard is still in beta. Development as an open source project remains shaky.
Our best hope, it turns out, may be to follow Jitkoff to his new job at Google, where he is working on Quick Search Box. The name is less than inspired, but the product, so far, is slick.
QSB quickly (as you would expect) searches your computer and the internet for the keywords you type in. It then presents a list of its findings, along with options for what to do with them. Typically, you would launch a program or file or open a URL in your web browser. Other choices include Quick Look, Show in Finder and Move to Trash.
Quicksilver users, of course, might scoff, because they are used to an array of plugins and forum advice that allow them to make their Macs do backflips. QSB isn’t there yet, but it does have a plugin architecture, which surely means that its abilities will be extended. One plugin currently pitched by Google allows you to interact with Twitter.
Aside from the functionality, I have to admit I’m a sucker for QSB’s polished and intuitive interface. I’m used to a more cluttered and complicated look from Google products, but this one borders on sophisticated. For example, I like the way it shows a nice big icon of the app you’ve selected.
If you haven’t used programs like Quicksilver or QSB before, you might be wondering what all the fuss is about. After all, Spotlight does a good job of finding and launching. And it’s not all that hard to fire up Safari and do a search from the ever-present Google search box.
For many people, Quicksilver is an efficient way of interacting with their Mac. You get one-stop shopping from the keyboard. Not all minds work the same way, of course, and for some people the benefits may not outweigh the time and effort it takes to learn something new.
The best thing about QSB is that it offers an alternative for who have come to rely on Quicksilver but fear for its future.
Posted Saturday, October 10, 2009 in Reviews
iTunes vs. doubleTwist
It’s hard to believe anyone would want to try to compete with Apple’s iTunes juggernaut, but that’s what the folks at doubleTwist are doing. Their big pitch is that they offer a choice. But unless that choice is particularly compelling, why would anyone consider it?
Let’s take a closer look.
When you fire up doubleTwist for the first time, you’re asked to create an account. That’s fair enough — you do the same thing with iTunes, although you may have long forgotten this step by now.
» The amazing similarities
The first thing that struck me about the interface is how similar it is to iTunes. Even the icons are almost identical. You’ve got a sidebar on the left with categories for music, photos and movies. The difference is that doubleTwist lists everything it finds on your Mac — not just the stuff in iTunes. This provides added access, but can be a bit messy if your collection is not well organized. A nice feature is that you can import your iTunes playlists and make your own within doubleTwist. You can, of course, double-click a song to play it.
One of the great selling points of iTunes is the store where you can choose from thousands of songs, buy them, download them to your computer and sync them to your iPod. You can also do this with doubleTwist. But in this case the store is Amazon, which has thousands of DRM-free MP3s for sale. Unfortunately, they are only available to U.S. residents, which is a big fail for those of us in the rest of the wide world.
doubleTwist also has something called My Feed. Maybe I’m just dense, but I couldn’t find any documentation on what looks to be an intriguing element.
Another feature not to be overlooked is the ability to share pictures and movies on services such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Or just use email. If nothing else, it’s handy.
» But what does it do with an iPod?
The big test came when I actually plugged my iPod into my iMac. At the time, doubleTwist and iTunes were already running, which might explain the beeps emitted by the iPod. Did it go crazy trying to connect with both programs at the same time? In any case, I quit iTunes and doubleTwist, restarted them one at a time, and my iPod happily showed up — along with all its songs — in the sidebars of both.
About 15 minutes later, the iPod somehow disconnected, complete with a warning that it had not been properly ejected. I’m not sure if this was related to doubleTwist, but it seems to have survived unharmed.
doubleTwist supports a whole array of devices beside the iPod. This is a definite plus over iTunes, but it can also lead to some oddities. For example, I’ve got the portable drive I use for Time Machine backups in the sidebar as well — complete with categories for non-existent music, movies and photos. I’m not sure whether to consider this humorous or amateurish.
» Conclusion
In the end, some nifty extra features and a clean interface found in doubleTwist make it an interesting alternative or complement to iTunes. But unless you really detest iTunes, it’s unlikely to be a replacement.
Posted Wednesday, October 7, 2009 in Reviews
My journey to Vienna
A lot of people are upset that the upcoming version of NetNewsWire will have an ad at the bottom of the sidebar, prompting some to make the switch to the open source news reader Vienna.
We won’t debate the merits of ads or no ads in an app here, but if you’re thinking of making the switch, you should know what you’re getting into. I’ve been using Vienna for a week to see if I would be happy with it. I’ve come to a conclusion, but first let’s look at the the details.
The first thing you should do is export your current feeds from NetNewsWire. Click on File -> Export Subscriptions . . . From there, you’ll be prompted to name the file and save it. You can just go with the default name and save it to some place handy such as the desktop.
Next, fire up Vienna and click on File -> Import Subscriptions . . . You’ll be prompted to navigate to the file you created with NetNewsWire. Go to it and click OK. The sidebar in Vienna will automatically be populated with all your subscriptions in the same order you had with NetNewsWire.
The tricky part is that if you had your feeds divided into various folders, you’ll have to create them yourself in Vienna and divvie up the feeds manually. This can be slightly confusing because Vienna refers to these folders as Group Folders and to the individual feeds as Folders. NetNewsWire uses the terms Folders and Sources, which makes more sense.
Once you’ve got everything set up, you’ll find that the interface you’re working with is quite similar to NetNewsWire — not to mention many other Mac apps that use the sidebar metaphor. The tool bar at the top of Vienna allows you do many of the same things as you could with NetNewsWire, but access is not always as handy. For example, sometimes you have to click on a Gear icon to get to the functions you want. In my case, I would have liked to have easier access to Mark All Articles As Read — although I did find Vienna’s Skip Folder to be an acceptable substitute.
With either program, you can, of course, double-click on a story and have it open in the originating website. I like the way Vienna’s tabs expand to show all or most of the title of the article using a spiffy animation. NetNewsWire truncates them all to the same length.
Once in a while, if I’m reading an article, I like to drag its bookmark onto the desktop so I can refer back to it later. With NetNewsWire (or Safari for that matter), you can grab onto the favicon and drag it to create a bookmark file. Strangely, this is not possible with Vienna. Of course, I could simply flag the item, and I can see myself getting used to doing things this way.
The big difference between the two programs is syncing. Simply put, you can do it with NetNewsWire and you can’t do it with Vienna. For many people, syncing is a great way to read the news from various devices, keeping everything in order. This isn’t an issue for me, so I didn’t miss it. But if you need syncing, this will be a deal breaker.
All in all, I have to say say my experience with Vienna has been positive. The few criticisms I have seem like nit-picks more than anything else.
If you want a good, free news reader sans ads, and you can live without syncing, Vienna is the way to go.
Posted Friday, August 7, 2009 in Reviews
Xmenu is a gem
Macworld has a favourable review of Xmenu, a nifty little freeware app from Devon Technologies that allows you to access files in various categories from the menubar.
It looks quite handy, although there are tradeoffs. On the one hand, you can declutter the dock by removing file folders, but on the other hand, your menubar may become a victim of moving clutter from one place to another.
We’ve mentioned Xmenu previously, noting that it is part of a freeware motherlode from Devon. Other apps you can get currently are EasyFind, PhotoStickies and ThumbsUp.
Posted Friday, August 7, 2009 in Reviews
Four stars for Blender
If it’s free, it must be second rate, right? Not at all. Macworld UK shows that free alternatives can indeed play with the big boys, giving Blender — used for 3D modelling, animation and game-creation — a solid four-star rating. Read the review.
Posted Saturday, July 25, 2009 in Reviews
Which Twitter app do the cool kids use?
The trouble with Twitter apps for Mac is that there is a ton of them out there, and pretty much all of them are good — or at least good enough that it really comes down to personal preference as to which one you consider the best.
So instead of laboriously going through a long list and making comparisons that only a geek would love, I decided to check in on what the cool kids are doing. By that I mean the people who make their living writing about Mac apps and just happen to have Twitter accounts. As you may know, each tweet is accompanied by a line showing its time and date and the program that was used to create it — thus revealing the tweeters’ app of choice.
I went to a site called MacNotables, which claims — not without merit — to have “the Mac experts you want to hear from.” With one possible exception, I agree that their experts are indeed notable and might even pass — in their own nerdy way — for the cool kids of the Mac universe.
I hunted them all down on Twitter, and here’s what I found:
(“Web,” by the way, refers to Twitter’s web interface.)
Christopher Breen, Macworld senior editor — Tweetie
(This one’s dicey, because I’m not sure if I have the right guy. Update: Confirmed. This one’s right.)
Bryan Chaffin, editor in chief of Mac Observer and iPod Observer — Tweetie
Jim Dalrymple — CEO and publisher of Loop Insight — Tweetie (along with a couple from Twitterific)
Adam Engst, publisher of TidBITS and Take Control — TweetDeck
Tonya Engst, editor-in-chief at TidBITS Publishing — web, with a couple from TweetDeck
(Interesting that the Engsts appear to differ.)
Dan Frakes, Macworld senior editor — Twitterific mainly, but also Birdfeed (an iPhone app) and web
Andy Ihnatko, technology pundit and self-described beloved personality — web
(OK, OK, he truly is beloved.)
Chuck Joiner, the voice of MacVoices, MacNotables and The Mac Jury — mainly Nambu, but also twhirl and txt
(Anyone know what “txt” might mean?)
Ted Landau, columnist for Mac Observer and Macworld, founder of MacFixIt — Tweetie
Bob LeVitus, author of dozens of technical books — Tweetie
Dennis Sellers, founder/editor-in-chief of Macsimum News — web
Jason Snell, Macworld editorial director — lately Twitterific, before that Tweetie
(He has an article in the August 2009 issue of Macworld about how to use AppleScript with Twitterific.)
Robin Williams, writer of many technical books — this heretic does not appear to have a Twitter account
And here is the final cool-kid tally:
Tweetie — six
web — four
Twitterific — three
TweetDeck — two
Nambu — one
Twhirl — one
Looks like Tweetie is the way to go if you want to be with the in crowd. Be careful, though, because they could switch at the drop of a tweet and leave you on the outs.
Posted Saturday, July 4, 2009 in Reviews
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