The PC Weenies » mac utilities

Software Pick of the Month: DragonDrop

Krishna — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:35:15 +0000

If you’ve ever been in the process of moving your files and realized midstream that you need to open a folder on your hard drive, you’ll come to appreciate the power and simplicity of DragonDrop.

DragonDrop is an elegant and useful Mac app that lets you set down what you are dragging without worrying about keeping the mouse button held down. It works great with files, folders, text snippets, etc. and has already improved my productivity ten-fold. It sells for $4.99 at the Mac App Store, and is easily worth its asking price.

How does it work?

Drag a file or set of files and shake your mouse cursor back and forth. A transparent DragonDrop window appears. Stuff your contents in the window and retrieve them when you’re ready to move them into their proper location. That’s it!

If you’re not a “mover and shaker”, you can use DragonDrop’s Menu Bar icon instead. DragonDrop’s prefs (shown below) are simple and self-explanatory.

In the snapshot below, I’ve selected three files and shaken my mouse cursor. The DragonDrop window (or portal, as I like to think of it) appears.

Drop your files into the portal until you are ready to retrieve your files.

DragonDrop is one of those little apps that quickly makes itself indispensable. I can’t imagine using any Mac without it. DragonDrop has eliminated the need for me to use a dual-paned window (a la Forklift or PathFinder) to move files because I can invoke it at a whim.

I’ve tested DragonDrop version 1.1.5 for about a day now and I’ve already given it a hefty workout. I haven’t run into any snags or bugs in my usage, but I’ll update this review if I run into any problems.

Conclusion

If you move files on a regular basis (and who doesn’t, really?), DragonDrop is easily the best $5 you’ll spend and earns a mighty 5 Bob Weiners. Highly Recommended.

-Krishna
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Mac Maintenance Sunday: Spelunking for Large File Sizes

Krishna — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 03:14:16 +0000

In preparation for Lion, I’ve been organizing and pruning my Mac Pro’s boot drive: a 40GB OWC SSD. Space is at a premium on this drive, so I’ve limited it to the OS (Snow Leopard) and my apps. All the data I interact with lives on a separate internal SATA HDD. It’s worked out for me well, so far.

The two screenshots below give a visual picture of all the apps I have currently installed, with some overlap on the second screenshot. Click on each to embiggen.

40GB is not a lot of space. With the help of the excellent WhatSize utility, I have been able to check which files are the largest on my system. I spent an afternoon investigating file sizes and what I’ve found was pretty interesting.

I currently have a little under 20GB sitting in my Applications folder. Some of these apps will be pruned out of my system (via AppZapper) when I install Lion. The largest application size belongs to Autodesk’s Maya, weighing in at 2.03GB.

Oddly enough, one of the largest files on my hard drive belongs to Backblaze, specifically within the Library > BackBlaze folder which weighs in at a ginormous 2.55GB. It’s pretty freaking huge and I’m not sure why. I’m currently investigating options to move the BackBlaze folder to another drive. The second largest file is Adobe, clocking in at 1.55GB. There’s over 314MB contained in a folder called SpeechAnalysisModels, which I’m not sure I’ll ever need. Same for the various Camera Raw profiles. I’m unsure whether or not it’s okay for me to delete these, so I’m leaving them for now.

My user folder takes up a whopping 1.58GB (nearly all of it comes from the Library folder within). The biggest culprits within the Library folder are the Applications Support folder (582MB) and Caches (527MB). Interestingly enough, the largest file inside the Caches folder belongs to com.atebits.tweetie.profile-images, which contains avatar images for everyone I follow on Twitter. Given that I’m using the official Twitter client now (formerly Tweetie), my suspicion is that the com.atebits.tweet.profile-images folder can be safely deleted. (On a side note: is there a Mac program that safely cleans out Application caches?)

Other culprits that took up a lot of space were the folders dubbed iPad Software Update and the iPod Software Update, found in User > Library > iTunes. Both folders took up almost 1GB of space together. I deleted both folders, as I can always re-download the applications should I ever need to restore my iPad and iPod devices.

In the process of doing some routine file size investigation, I’ve reclaimed almost 2GB of space, leaving my SSD with about 9GB free. With that said and done, I only have one thing left to say: Bring on Lion!

-Krishna

Update: I reclaimed an additional 2GB of data using Monolingual to remove the additional language resources that I’ll never use from Mac OSX. It also does a good job of scrubbing away PowerPC code from the Universal binary apps if you’re on an Intel Mac (saving even more space).Similar Posts:

Review: Teleport 1.0.2

Krishna — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 01:44:38 +0000

Product: Teleport
Manufacturer: Abyssoft
Date Reviewed: 6-18-11
Version Reviewed: 1.0.2
Retail Price: donationware

Teleport is a PreferencePane that lets you control several Macs using a single keyboard and mouse. Simply move your mouse to the edge of your screen and your mouse cursor “teleports” to your nearby Mac. With Teleport you can synchronize your pasteboard to copy and paste easily between multiple Macs. You can even drag and drop files between Teleport configured Macs – with no need to mount volumes beforehand.

Sound too good to be true?

That’s what I thought, until I tried it for myself. In short, Teleport works as advertised. I’ve tested the program with Snow Leopard between my two Macs, one laptop and one desktop. Teleport works with Leopard, too. If you happen to rock a PowerPC Mac, you’re in luck – because Teleport also supports that configuration, albeit with a slightly older version (1.0.1).

Installation was drop-dead simple: Double-click the Teleport PreferencePane and the Teleport icon shows up in your System Preferences. Teleport also installs itself as a menu item, making access even more convenient. To make use of Teleport, you’ll have to install and activate it on every Mac screen you want to share.

The Teleport PrefPane includes three main areas: Layout, Security Settings, and Options.
In the Layout tab, you can activate (or deactivate) Teleport. To make use of Teleport, you will also need to click the “Share this Mac” button. In the Layout tab, you can arrange the shared Macs. I kept my Macbook Pro’s screen on the left and the Mac Pro’s screens on the right, to match the physical placement I have between both machines. Teleport supports dual display monitors.

The security settings allow for encrypted connections and you an also specify access via the Control requests radio buttons.

Within the Options tab, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to enable screen switching, customize the delay between switching screens andalso configure support for dragging and dropping files between Macs. You can also specify a rule to limit how large pasted files can be, if you plan to copy and paste between Macs.

Teleport works as advertised with my computing setup. I plan to test it on my G5 machine soon. It’s an incredibly useful tool if you manage two or more close proximity Macs. For optimum use, you want to make sure that you can physically see all the screens you plan to “teleport” between. If you have Macs in other rooms where you can’t see the screen directly, using Apple’s Screen Sharing app makes more sense.

If you haven’t already guessed, I really like Teleport. If all it did was let you share one keyboard and mouse between multiple Macs, it would still be a good program – but the addition of drag and drop file transfer between Macs and the inclusion of a synchronized pasteboard between multiple Macs makes Teleport a no-brainer to download. The only thing that would make Teleport even more awesome is if there was a method to share one keyboard between multiple platforms, like the open-source Synergy. In my experience, however, Teleport is much easier to install and configure compared to Synergy.

Update: Since this review was written, I’ve noticed a few times when the cursor does not return back to the main screen after “teleporting” to another. The only fix that I have been able to find is to go to the Teleport Menu on the controlled screen and deselect “Share this Mac”.

Teleport earns a solid 4.5 out of 5 stars. If you like the program, kick in a few bucks to the developer!

-KrishnaSimilar Posts:

Review: Memory Cleaner

Krishna — Tue, 24 May 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Product: Memory Cleaner
Manufacturer: Alice Dev Team
Date Reviewed: 5-24-11
Retail Price: $5.99 via Mac App Store

Every time your Mac opens an application, it uses more memory. But sometimes the OS doesn’t relinquish the extra RAM, even after the memory-hungry application has quit. If you work with memory intensive applications on your Mac, such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Manga Studio Pro or even Maya, you’ve probably experienced your machine running at a crawl. Up until now, the two solutions for such sluggishness have been:

1) Reboot the Mac.
2) Buy more RAM.

I have 10 GB of RAM in my Mac Pro, and I find that, given the opportunity, both applications and OS will use up every bit of that memory. Quitting an app may not be enough – as the memory may still contain residual data that’s no longer being used. Rebooting, as easy as it is, wasn’t an option for me.

Thankfully, the Alice Dev Team felt the same way and, more importantly, decided to do something about it.

Memory Cleaner, a simple $5.99 app, does one thing and one thing alone: it frees up wasted memory that’s not being used and, in turn, makes your Mac run faster. The application itself has a tiny footprint, weighing in at under 400KB. The best part of Memory Cleaner is that you don’t need to restart your Mac to reap the benefits. Simply invoke the app and click the “Clean My Memory” button and you will see how much additional free memory you have available.

It’s pretty straight-forward. I have gotten into the habit of running Memory Cleaner when I’ve finished using a memory hungry application. The reclaimed space averages anywhere between 200MB to 1GB, depending upon the application you’ve recently quit. When you’ve clicked the “Clean My Memory” button, you’ll get this dialog box:

No biggie – as the runtime operation of Memory Cleaner is usually a few seconds or so.

So, the application works as advertised. But you’re probably asking: is it worth the $6.00? Wouldn’t it be easier to reboot and just call it a day?

For most people – yes, $6.00 is overkill. But if you are running several memory intensive applications $6.00 is a small price to pay to reclaim wasted memory and improve overall performance. As I maintain 3 computers at home, the average cost per machine worked out to $2.00 – so I feel that the app was completely worth it. In a perfect world, Mac OS X would perform its own memory purge after closing an app, but until that happens, there’s always Memory Cleaner.

Memory Cleaner earns 5 out of 5 Bob Weiners.

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Software Pick of the Week: CalendarBar

Krishna — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

I found a very useful program that is sure to please Mac users who are scouting for a super quick and convenient way to check their upcoming calendar events at a glance.

That program is CalendarBar, by the developers at Clean Cut Code. CalendarBar lets you access your calendar events from the menubar and supports iCal, Facebook and Google Calendar. Thus far, I’ve used it with all three and it works beautifully. Syncing my Google Calendar with CalendarBar was simple: I entered my Google login credentials and saw my Google Calendar appointments show up almost immediately.

I also really like the fact that I can check out upcoming Facebook events and birthdays quickly and easily using CalendarBar. You can customize the fonts, the number of weeks in advance to display, and even have event reminders pop up with Growl notification. The attention to detail is evident, both in the top notch design and streamlined user interface. The developers have been quick to respond to feature requests, which always bodes well.

One feature I would really like to see is the option to have my iCal To-Do’s appear on CalendarBar. Right now, all my To-Do’s are on my laptop – it would be great to have access to them on my desktop as well.

I picked up CalendarBar for free last week as part of a special Mac App Store promotion, but I would have gladly paid the retail price of $2.99. The app looks good, works great and is well worth the asking price if you rely heavily on your calendar.

-KrishnaSimilar Posts:

iStat 3.0 at First Blush

Krishna — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:30 +0000

Call me a process junkie. Call me a geek.

Why? Because I like to have access to nerdy stats about my computers. What sort of stats, you say? Stuff like CPU utilization, free hard drive space, processor temperatures, fan speed, network activity and the like. And iStat 3.0, from Bjango, does exactly that stuff (and more) for users running Macs.

I’ve been running some flavor of iStat on my computers for at least a few years now. It has always delivered on what it promised – easy access to nerdy stats presented in an attractive set of dropdown menubar items.

With versions 2 and prior, the program installed itself as a PrefPane, where individual stat preferences could be toggled on or off and customized. Prior versions of iStat were also donationware. (I recall tossing in a few bucks to the cause a few years back.)

With iStat 3, there are two significant changes worth noting:

the program is now a stand-alone application, living in the Applications folder
the program costs $10 for a limited time, after which it will run $15.

The ultimate question Mac users may have is: Is it worth the money?

Let’s take a look at a few of iStat 3′s features. As I mentioned earlier, iStat 3 is now an application.

From the main application, you can toggle the menus you want to monitor. You can also toggle the color of the skin: Aqua (gray) or Blaqua (black) as well as the color of the graphs (shown below).

The iStat menulets on the menubar provide at-a-glance information for each paramter. Clicking on an iStat menulet item will give detailed information pertaining to selected menulet. Below are a few screenshots.

Bandwidth and network monitoring:

Memory Usage:

overall CPU utilization, uptime, and processes:

Hard drive usage for all attached drives, with instant access to Apple’s Disk Utility:

A built-in calendar, date and time as well as a custom list of international time zones:

Temperature sensor readings and fan speed:

Battery usage:

In my usage, iStat 3 is pretty slick.

I’ve read online about users griping about the price. Given the amount of time the developers at Bjango put into producing such a polished piece of software, I found the introductory $10 price to be acceptable. The regular price of $15, however, seems to be a little steep.

The best purchase value for iStat 3.0, in my opinion, is for users of multiple Macs. For $18, you can run iStat on up to 5 machines, bringing the unit cost per license down to $3.60. I chose this option for the 4 Macs we have at home.

The program works well, and I haven’t experienced any problems. As for value, that’s entirely up to whether you need such monitoring.

You could always go with the open source GeekTool, which offers similar functionality (albeit on the desktop, not via the menubar). The downside to GeekTool is that it’s not as pretty, and more importantly, your stats can be buried by windows and applications during normal usage.

You have 15 days to try out iStat 3.0 to see if it’s right for you. Minimum requirements are 10.5, and it works great on 10.6. The units I tested on were a Macbook Pro (2008), Mac Pro (2008) and a G5 Dual 2GHz (2003). Give iStat 3 a whirl, if you enjoy monitoring such nerdy things, like I do.

Happy geeking! :)

-KrishnaSimilar Posts:

Mac Software Picks: HyperSpaces

Krishna — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:17:43 +0000

From time to time, I run across some truly useful Macintosh utilities and applications that help me in my workflow. I’d like to share my latest discovery:

Hyperspaces

Spaces, Apple’s virtual desktop environment, isn’t complete without this $13 shareware application. Currently in Public Preview, Tony Arnold’s application allows you to customize each Space the way you want – via desktop pictures, colors, text labels, and even the name of each Space.

For instance, you can assign a separate desktop background for each space. You can also assign individual text labels, via custom fonts and colors. You can even adjust the position of the text label for each desktop. I prefer to have my text labels for each desktop on the upper left side.

When you switch between Spaces, the transition between each desktop is smooth. The unregistered version allows you to customize 2 Spaces – perfect for test driving this program. The registered version allows you to customize additional Spaces. After installing and using this app for two days, I registered my copy to support the developer’s efforts.

I evaluated my copy on a Macbook Pro and MacPro.

There are some niggles with this application, but given that it hasn’t officially hit 1.0, but the developer has been good about keeping users posted with updates.

In my usage of the app, I discovered that HyperSpaces doesn’t work with CocoaTech’s newest version of Path Finder. That’s because Path Finder draws its own Desktop on the screen. The workaround I’ve found is to uncheck “Hide Finder’s Desktop” within the Path Finder preferences.

Through SpaceSwitcher, an option within HyperSpaces, you can see a custom view of all your desktops by holding Option-` (backwards tick). See screenshot below:

As far as my wish list, here’s what I’d like to see in future versions:

1) multiple monitor support
2) pure Path Finder integration
3) application / window views within each SpaceSwitcher window, similar to the way virtual desktop apps of yore (CodeTek’s Virtual Desktop, etc.)

HyperSpaces has behaved well on my system. No crashes or slow-downs were caused by this application. I have confidence in the future of this app, as it was developed by the author of the late, lamented VirtueDesktops – one of the best virtual desktop apps on the market before Apple introduced Spaces.

I really found this application to be useful. I have separate Spaces assigned to Photoshop, Painter, Netnewswire and Web/Mail. I can now easily tell which desktop I’m on, and that makes me more productive. This is something I wish Apple had implemented from the get-go.

In short, if you’re looking for a better way to organize and manage your Spaces, check out HyperSpaces. HyperSpaces requires 10.5.4 and works on Intel and PPC Macs.

-KrishnaSimilar Posts: