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OS X posts

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Macintosh, Freeware, Social Software, web 2.0

Cocoalicious: Browser for Del.icio.us bookmarks

Macby Jay Hathaway Jun 30th 2008

Cocoalicious is a really slick -- but, unfortunately, Mac-only -- dedicated browser for your Del.icio.us bookmarks. If you're a bookmarking junkie, and you have way more sites saved to Del.icio.us than you could ever hope to keep track of, this could be an ideal solution for you. It's laid out a bit like Apple Mail, with your tags running down the left side, your bookmarks on top, and a browser pane at the bottom.

You can put bookmarks directly into Cocoalicious -- it syncs with your Del.icio.us account -- or use the bookmarklet to add stuff to Cocoalicious straight from your browser. This way you can take advantage of autocompletion, tagging by dragging, and other features that make Del.icio.us easier. Cocoalicious also supports Spotlight, so you can search for your bookmarks straight from the Finder!


[via Lifehacker]

Tags: bookmarks, Cocoalicious, del.icio.us, delicious, folksonomy, os x, OsX, tagging

Filed under: Internet, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, Browsers

Firefox 3 download day made possible by Windows

by Joey Celis Jun 28th 2008

On June 17, 2008 Mozilla attempted to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. According to Mozilla over 8 million downloads were recorded. Currently they are awaiting word from Guinness if they were successful.

But there was one thing we wanted to know about this number. Out of the 3 major operating systems in use today which one blazed away with the most downloads. So we decided to ask and a Mozilla spokesperson gave us the following numbers:

  • Windows 79%
  • Linux 13%
  • OS X 8%

Now the number 1 spot didn't surprise us at all since Windows leads in overall computer operating systems it's almost a given that most of the downloads would come from Windows. But what was a bit surprising was that Linux bested OS X in the numbers of downloads.

One could say that Ubuntu, which is a very popular Linux distro comes packaged with Firefox so it's only natural that more downloads would come from Linux users. But according to w3counter, OS X accounts for 4.95% of the operating systems in use while Linux is barely half of this at 2.01%

So this strikes us as odd. What would cause OS X to slip to 3rd place in the number of downloads? Do these numbers suggested that Apple users only like to use Apple apps? Or did a large group of Mac users not get invited to the download party?

Tags: firefox, linux, os x, OsX, ubuntu, windows

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Windows Mobile, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, iPhone

Evernote launches into open beta, introduces premium accounts

WindowsMacby Jay Hathaway Jun 24th 2008

If you're not one of the 125,000 people who got a chance to try out the cross-platform note capture app Evernote during its private beta, don't despair. Evernote has launched an open beta, so now everyone can give it a try. If you were already in the beta, does this change anything for you? Yes, indeed it does: there are now two types of Evernote accounts, free and premium.

Free users keep all the features of the closed beta, with the caveat that you're now limited to 40mb a month of uploaded notes. If you're a power-user, or someone who's really sold on the Evernote lifestyle, go premium for 5 bucks a month or $45/year and get rid of that cap. Premium also comes with the option of SSL for all your uploads (for all those pictures of the enemy base, we guess) and priority access to the queue for Evernote's text-recognition features.

Tags: capture, Evernote, GTD, mobile, note, OS X, OsX, public beta, PublicBeta, Windows

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity

Tofu makes on-screen reading actually bearable

Macby Jay Hathaway Jun 24th 2008

If you're like us, you have to read long blocks of text on a monitor all the time, and it's kind of a pain for your eyes. E-books and long PDF articles would be great if they could somehow get diced into neat, readable columns. Hey, it works for newspapers. Well, Tofu brings that pleasant reading experience to the Mac.

In a nutshell, Tofu cuts up what you're reading -- whether it's a PDF, a doc, or a chunk of text you've selected -- into columns. This is a good, because monitors are wider than the human eye is really comfortable with, and columns fit the text into your optimal scanning area for easy reading. Tofu's full screen mode and adjustable text size and colors are crucial, too. This app is good enough that we'll think twice before printing out something we can just read in Tofu.

Tags: documents, os x, OsX, PDF, reader, text, Tofu

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Troubleshooting

Switching to Camino? CookieThief can help

Macby Jay Hathaway Jun 14th 2008

Besides having one of the coolest names for an app that we've seen in a while, CookieThief is pretty handy if you're thinking about switching to the sexy, lightweight Mac browser Camino. Sure, a lot of people prefer Camino's speedy, no-frills browsing experience to flashier, more bloated browsers like Firefox and Safari, but Camino apparently forgot one handy little feature for switchers: moving your cookies over from your old browser.

Retyping those passwords is a pain, so you can use CookieThief to steal all your login cookies from Safari and put them right into Camino. No fuss, no muss, just cookies. We'll admit this is an app with a pretty limited scope, and you'll probably only use it once, but if you can't be bothered to do it yourself, it might be just what you're looking for. (Oh, and if you happen to be going from Camino to Safari, CookieThief can copy your cookies that way, too!)

Tags: browsers, camino, os x, OsX, safari

Filed under: Security, Utilities

Hide your email address from spammers with The Enkoder

by Jay Hathaway Jun 13th 2008

Many of us have been in this situation: you want to post your email address on your website so that people can read it, click a link, and get in touch with you. You're worried about displaying your email as a regular link, though, because bots will index it and start sending you spam. If you want to post your email address on a website so that it's readable by humans, but obfuscated from any bots trying to harvest it, take a look at The Enkoder.

The Enkoder is a quick web form (and a Mac desktop app!) that takes your email address and the link text you want to use, and spits out some encrypted JavaScript that you can put on the web. It's provided free-of-charge by Dan Benjamin and HiveLogic.com. The Mac version runs straight from your machine and remembers previous encodings.

[via Daring Fireball]

Tags: email, Enkoder, hivelogic, os x, OsX, spam

Filed under: Security, Utilities, Video, Macintosh

Turn your webcam into a security camera with Periscope

Macby Jay Hathaway Jun 10th 2008

Have you ever wondered how you could set your webcam up as a security camera and have the images sent to you somewhere else? Maybe you wanted motion detection or noise detection to turn it on automatically? Or maybe that's just us, and we're a little paranoid. Regardless, Periscope is a tool that lets you do all of those things with your webcam, and more.

You can trigger it to start recording in several ways: motion detection, noise detection, via Apple Remote, or with a timer. Once it's on, it'll capture images and save them to disc or send them to a few other places for review. It works with Flickr, e-mail, FTP, iPhoto, and the now-obsolete .mac (presumably an upcoming version will support MobileMe). You can also time-stamp or add your own logo automatically to your pictures.

Even if you're not interested in the security applications of Periscope, you might find it useful for making time-lapse videos. With its ability to capture images at intervals, you could theoretically capture your entire day at your desk if you had the disk space. Although we tested it with a built-in iSight, Periscope should work with other webcams.

Tags: freeverse, image capture, ImageCapture, Os X, OsX, Periscope, security, time-lapse, video, webcam

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Shareware

OmniGrowl: Growl notifications for practically everything.

Macby Jay Hathaway Jun 9th 2008

OmniGrowl
If you're a devotee of Growl, the slick pop-up notification system for OS X, then you've probably got a wishlist of apps that need Growl support. Even some of the ubiquitous Apple apps like iCal and Address Book don't work well with Growl. No need to fret about that, though, just download OmniGrowl, and you can set Growl notifications for practically everything.

When we say practically everything, we mean OmniGrowl will give you Growl popups for traffic alerts, flight stats, weather, new RSS stories, daily deals on Woot, words of the day from the Oxford English Dictionary, and any potential leaks in your kitchen sink. Ok, we're just kidding about that last one, but OmniGrowl covers an impressive list of apps and functions. You don't have to go overboard, though: if you just want Growl for your iCal events and Address Book birthdays, OmniGrowl can handle that, too.

Tags: growl, notification, notifiers, OmniGrowl, Os X, OsX

Filed under: Fun, Games, Macintosh

Neon Tango: Exploding geometry has never been so addictive - Time Waster

Macby Jay Hathaway Jun 2nd 2008

We at Download Squad strive to find apps and services that make it easier for you to get things done. If that's what you're looking for, you should stop reading this post now, because once you start playing Neon Tango, you won't be getting anything done for a while. Neon Tango is 50 levels of colorful geometric space-shooter, set to an adrenaline-pumping soundtrack by Digital Droo.

The fun of Neon Tango is in its simplicity. While the visuals are pretty cool, the emphasis is clearly on gameplay. Your ship handles like a dream, and the variety of enemies in the three demo levels was sufficient to hold our interest through a few replays. Because the controls are so responsive, we wholeheartedly recommending playing a little Neon Tango as a break from work. The difficulty level of the game is adjustable, so blowing up rogue shapes can be challenging, but it doesn't have to be frustrating.

Neon Tango carries a $24.95 pricetag, which seems pretty fair for the hours of playing time and replay value you'll get out of it. This is, of course, not taking into account any money you might lose by gaming instead of working. The game will run on a G4 or better, and you can turn off some of the fancy visual effects if it's not fast enough for you.

Tags: Digital Droo, DigitalDroo, games, mac, Neon Tango, NeonTango, os x, OsX

Filed under: Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity

NameChanger - batch renaming made easy on OS X

Macby Jay Hathaway May 26th 2008

NameChanger
A lot of digital cameras are great for taking photos, but pretty shoddy for naming files. Sure, it's alright to have them listed by date and time -- at least that keeps them in order -- but we think it's a lot nicer to rename a batch of photos so you remember what they're actually of. That's where NameChanger comes in. It's a lightweight renaming app for OS X, with a focus on images.

NameChanger can append, prepend, replace, or rename all kinds of files with whatever input you give it, but it really shines when it comes to pictures. Drag a batch into the image browser, switch to sequence mode, and "DCP_16739" becomes "Hawaii01," or whatever you want it to be. Let NameChanger keep the numbers straight for you. And, at a tiny 1.9mb, you probably have pictures that take up more disk space than this useful little app.


Tags: images, NameChanger, os x, OsX, photos, rename, rename multiple files, RenameMultipleFiles

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Macintosh

Krix: great-looking visual music browser

Macby Jay Hathaway May 26th 2008

Krix is a flashy way to browse, organize and play your music. It relies on album art to visually represent all the albums you've got in your digital collection, and it supports the Apple Remote. We don't think Krix is quite ready for the bigtime yet, though. It has a couple of drawbacks, including its reliance on iTunes for playing music (the controls you see at the top of the Krix window are just an iTunes remote) and the need to create a tiny .krix file for each song, so it knows how to organize and display it.

The obvious plus of Krix is that it has big, bright playlist buttons, and features several ways to sort your albums. Although the newest version requires OS X 1.05, Krix was started before Leopard and Coverflow. It still looks nice, but since Krix needs iTunes anyway, and Coverflow does a decent job of displaying album art on its own, we'll pass on this app for now.

Tags: audio, iTunes, krix, mp3, music, os x, OsX

Filed under: Macintosh, E-mail, Productivity

Mail Badger - why stop at just one badge?

Macby Jay Hathaway May 24th 2008



Although Mail Badger sounds like a small woodland creature trained to deliver packages, it's actually an OS X app that allows you to add extra badges to the Apple Mail dock icon. For some people, it's good enough to have one single red badge, proudly displaying the number of unread messages from all their email accounts. The developers of Mail Badger didn't want to stop there: why not have a different badge for each account?

Once installed, Mail Badger lives in your Apple Mail preferences. There are a few preset shapes - hearts, stars, circles and the default starburst. You can adjust the color, size and font on these easily, and even upload your own. For power users, Mail Badger will assign a badge for messages that meet search criteria you specify, and it will also badge the results of an AppleScript. This app is definitely worth installing for anyone who keeps mail across more than one folder or account.

Tags: alerts, apple mail, AppleMail, dock icons, DockIcons, email, icon, mail, os x, OsX

Filed under: Fun, Utilities, Macintosh, E-mail, Freeware

StatusScreenSaver - don't miss notifications while your screensaver is on

Macby Jay Hathaway May 23rd 2008

statuscreenIf you're like us, you go to sleep with your monitor displaying the latest trendy screensaver. And if you're like us, you unfortunately wake up about a million times a night, wondering whether you have any new email, or any new updates from your favorite blog. Status Screen Saver has got you covered. It displays handy status badges for apps like Mail, NetNewsWire and Twitterrific, so you can see at a glance that nobody's sending you a message at 3 a.m. and go peacefully back to bed.

Status Screen Saver is extremely well-designed. It's technically a screensaver file itself, it just lets you choose which saver you want in its options menu. Other well-thought out features: apps with new updates have red badges, and they're grey if there's nothing new, the icons are resizable, and you can create your own AppleScript modules for apps that aren't already supported. The only very minor quibble we have is that badges get cut off a bit when you get into four-digit numbers, but you can work around this by not having 1100 unread emails.

Tags: os x, OsX, screensaver, statusscreensaver

Filed under: Design, Fun, Macintosh

Comic Life Magiq: heroic comic-building app from Plasq

Macby Jay Hathaway May 12th 2008



Comic Life Magiq is the latest and greatest version of the familiar Comic Life app you've probably seen bundled with some Macs. It takes the Comic Life concept of building comic strips using your own images, and gives you a fully-loaded toolbox that makes the job easy and a lot of fun.

To build a nice-looking page, all you have to do is grab one of the many pre-loaded layouts and drag it to your new page. The panels drop into place, and you can begin dragging in images, which fit your panels by default. Then you can add some text, using a wide range of speech balloons. Voila! Easy comics!

Comic Life Magiq is definitely not hard to use, but it also doesn't force you to color inside the lines. You can do everything by hand, if you're so inclined. Plenty of advanced options (grouping panels and adding reflections, for example) are included, but we found no need to use them to pack the recommended daily allowance of POW! ZAP! and BLAMMO! into our test comic. If you liked the idea of Comic Life, but found its lack of image editing and customization a bit boring, Magiq won't fail to impress.

Tags: comic, Comic Life, ComicLife, comics, os x, OsX, plasq

Filed under: Design, Developer, Utilities, Video, Beta

Silverback brings advanced usability testing to the Mac

by Jay Hathaway May 12th 2008

Silverback, a new OS X application from the renowned UK-based design team Clearleft, was a mystery for quite a while. The app had a site with some neat visual tricks and a gorilla with a clipboard, and it said the application was for designers, but what did it do? The suspense was killing us! We finally had a chance to test Silverback this week, and if you design websites or application interfaces, this program is worth the wait.

Silverback basically turns your Mac into a full-featured usability testing station. Add a new project, add some users, and have them come sit down and test out your interface. Silverback hangs out unobtrusively in the background, capturing video of the the entire screen, including a cute (and useful) effect that marks where your tester is clicking. This in itself would be handy, but Silverback also takes advantage of your built-in iSight camera to include a picture-in-picture of the tester's reactions, on top of the screen capture.

This way, you can see everything the user is doing in real time, and they can speak comments aloud as they come up, rather than pausing to write them down. Usability testing the old-fashioned way generally involves expensive setups and lots of instructions, but Silverback is intuitive to use and provides straightforward and informative results. Silverback is currently in private beta, so some testers can test its testing functions (this makes our heads hurt a little bit.)

Tags: beta, clearleft, design, isight, os x, OsX, Silverback, ui, video

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