There’s certainly no shortage of password managers for OS X—there’s even a basic one (Keychain Access) built into the OS, and the next versions of OS X and iOS will include a cross-device-syncing option. But rather than over-saturating the market, these apps are catering to different kinds of users—and that can only be good news if it means better security for more people.

A case in point is Lunabee’s $13 OneSafe (Mac App Store link), one of a genre of apps designed to keep your personal information safe from prying eyes while making it readily available when you need it. (I review the OS X version here, but a $6 iOS version is also available—your data synchronizes between devices over iCloud.)

Setting up OneSafe is a simple process; a quick wizard walks you through the process of choosing how you’ll unlock your password database. Unlike most of its competitors, which support only passphrase-based unlocking, OneSafe offers a choice of four unlocking mechanisms: a four-digit PIN, a full passphrase, a pattern-drawing keypad similar to the one implemented by some versions of Android, and a set of four combination-lock wheels. (To help you if you forget your combination or password, OneSafe allows you to choose two security questions, although these are optional.)

Giving users multiple options is a great idea, particularly for those who suffer from disorders like dyscalculia, or people who simply have a hard time remembering complicated passwords. Still, I’m not a fan of the app offering a four-digit PIN as an option, given the weak level of security it provides.

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iChat’s transformation into Messages was not exactly welcomed with open arms by Mac users everywhere. Some find the integration between iMessages and instant messages clunky; others have experienced a lot of flakiness (some of which Apple claims to have fixed in a recent OS X update); and yet more don’t like the app’s search functionality.

It’s the last of these that Fantastical maker Flexibits has focused on with its newest app, Chatology. The software aims to revitalize the Messages search feature, providing advanced functionality that makes it even easier to find the messages that you’re looking for.

Though it’s a standalone app, Chatology does integrate with Messages; when you install it, the app hijacks Messages’s Command-F shortcut. Use that key combination and Chatology launches automatically. (If you’d rather it only launch manually, you can deactivate that feature in Chatology’s preferences—in fact, it’s the only option there.)

Searching in Chatology is much like searching in messages. Enter a search term in the field in the top right of the window, and you’ll be presented with a list of results that match. When you enter the search term, the app also lets you choose to search for conversations that contain that term or places where that term appears as a name—for example, I can search for chats about my friend Evan or chats from my friend Evan.

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Many Mac users whose relationship with the Mac predates Mac OS X retain an affection for macro utilities—applications that let you string together a series of actions, and summon those macros with a click or a key press to automate repetitive tasks. Chief among them was QuicKeys, an application passed from company to company before finally coming to rest (and currently in deep hibernation) with Startly Technologies.

With the decline of QuicKeys and the arrival of new users who are generally unaware of utilities of its ilk, macro utilities seem to have dropped off the radar during the past few years. And that’s regrettable, particularly when one as useful, powerful, and affordable as Keyboard Maestro 6 ($36; $18 for upgrades) exists.

Working with the Maestro

When I reviewed Keyboard Maestro 4.2 in 2010, I covered the utility’s workflow, which hasn’t changed significantly (though its system requirements have—version 6 requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion). Feel free to check that review for all the details, but here’s the gist: The macro editor is laid out in three columns. The first includes any macro groups you’ve created. as well the All Macros group. The second column displays all macros in the selected group (both those included with Keyboard Maestro and those you’ve made). The third column details the actions included in the selected macro.

When you create a new macro, the third column becomes the editing area where you add actions and configure triggers (the things you must do to execute the macro—type a keyboard shortcut, type a string of characters, or launch an application, for instance). When adding an action, you’ll notice that the first two columns change: The first shows categories of actions, and the second offers actions associated with the selected category. To create a macro, you just drag actions from the second column to the third, in the order in which you want them to execute.

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It pays to know what’s going on inside your Mac, whether you’re watching your free memory or monitoring hardware. To that end, almost no piece of software does what Bjango’s $16 iStat Menus 4.05 achieves, offering full monitoring of your system’s CPU, RAM, and disk usage; network activity; component temperatures; fan speeds; Bluetooth functionality; and international dates and times. If you crave useful, at-a-glance information about your Mac’s components, iStat Menus puts that data right in your menu bar.

Over the years, iStat Menus has had a few radical transformations, growing beyond its origins as a freeware System Preferences pane to become a full-fledged application—but it has grown up gracefully. You can customize the application, which now resides in your menu bar, to display information about the specific components you’d like to watch. On my 2011 13-inch MacBook Pro, I prefer to display the Battery, Network, Hard Drive, RAM, and CPU modules on display. Dragging the desired components into place is easy enough.

iStat Menus offers generous portions of valuable technical information in a readily digestible format. A quick click on the Temperature-sensor module, for instance, reveals the temperatures for each element of your computer, down to components such as the CPU cores, your MacBook’s palm rest and battery, and so on. The utility can display historical data as a chart that allows you to see exactly how each component in your Mac has performed over time. This feature is handy for diagnosing components that may be failing, and outside of a few programs—including the tools generally leased to Apple Certified Macintosh Technicians—it’s rare to find a program that offers readouts for specific modules, sensors, and system components.

Other features, such as a battery-cycle counter and -condition readout, help answer pertinent questions, such as whether your battery is in good shape and when you might need to fork out some dough to Apple for a replacement. Shortcuts for Apple’s Activity Monitor, Console, Terminal, System Profiler, and System Preferences give you easy access, so you don’t have to wade through the /Applications/Utilities folder to get to the app you want.

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Writing a script is fun. Formatting a script? Less so. Many an idea can be paused or squashed entirely when you’re focused on making sure your character headers are properly centered. Film industry favorite Final Draft attempts to automate many of these hassles, but the program is still somewhat chaotic for those looking to simply write.

Enter the $20 Highland (Mac App Store link), which uses the Markdown-inspired Fountain syntax to offer screenwriters a simpler, cleaner place to bring their characters to life.

Highland’s big appeal comes not just from its minimalist writing interface, but its conversion capabilities. The app can import a text-based PDF or FDX (Final Draft) file and translate it into editable Fountain text without losing your initial formatting. You can likewise export a Fountain file to a PDF or FDX file once you’re ready for an inital reading or more-advanced formatting.

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Jörg Jacobsen’s $5 Eye-Friendly (Mac App Store link) is the third resolution-switching utility for the Retina MacBook Pro that I’ve looked at, after Pupil () and QuickRes (). In my quest to find the ideal resolution-switching app for my Retina MacBook Pro, is the third app the charm?

Like the other two apps, Eye-Friendly appears only in the menu bar. When you want to change your display’s resolution, you click the Eye-Friendly icon and mouse over your display (the menu lists your laptop’s built-in display, as well as any external displays); a submenu appears with available resolutions. Resolutions that look the best on that display are denoted with an Eye-Friendly icon; choose the desired resolution to switch to it. If you use only the best-looking resolutions, the Eye-Friendly Modes Only option configures the app to show only those resolutions.

Eye-Friendly’s menu is much more elegant that QuickRes’s, though it’s not as flexible as Pupil’s, which allows you to not only select which specific resolutions you want to appear in the menu, but also re-label them. But since it’s not difficult to find a resolution in Eye-Friendly’s list—and, as I mentioned, you can narrow the list down to show only the best resolutions—this level of customization isn’t a feature I miss.

Eye-Friendly also offers convenient keyboard shortcuts: Just place your cursor on the display you want to change, and then press Control+Option+Command+Up Arrow to cycle up through available resolutions or +Down Arrow to cycle down. Eye-Friendly displays each resolution in a semi-transparent overlay on the screen; when you settle for a couple seconds on the one you want, the display’s resolution changes to match.

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While I often set timers with Siri on my iPhone, doing so means I need another Siri command or series of swipes and taps to check the timer’s progress. When I’m at my desk working, I prefer a simple onscreen timer. Whimsicalifornia's $3 Timebar (Mac App Store link) is a nifty timer app that lives in your menu bar. Actually, lives isn’t quite the right word: Timebar consumes your menu bar—but in a good way.

To use Timebar, you simply click the Timebar icon in your menu bar (it’s the one that looks like a stopwatch, which makes it easy to confuse with the Time Machine icon), and then you drag a slider to set the length of your timer. Click Start, and the background of your Mac’s menu bar turns blue, fading from right to left until the timer hits zero—much like any standard progress bar. When the timer runs out, you’re alerted with a dialog box and, optionally, a sound.

The aforementioned slider is an unusual design choice: You can set a timer for one minute, two minutes, and then in five-minute increments up to four hours, and then in 30-minute increments up to eight hours. I understand the thinking behind this approach, but it limits your flexibility when it comes to choosing a timer length. For example, I brew my tea for four minutes, and I put some foods in the microwave for seven. I’d like to at least have the option to enter the timer duration manually.

That said, you can download a pair of Timebar extras for setting timers of any length using Alfred or Terminal. And the app is scriptable with a custom URL protocol (timebar://), which means you can create your own means to control it—for example, by using LaunchBar.

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Back in the days of 56-kbps modems and 1.44MB floppies, compressing files was a necessity. These days, bandwidth and storage are less of a concern, but there are still reasons to package files into neat little bundles. A zip archive, for example, lets you attach a single “file” to an email message instead of tacking on multiple items. The zip file is smaller than the sum of those separate files—and it’s an industry standard that works across platforms.

OS X has long been able to uncompress zip files and some other archive types, using its built-in Archive Utility, but I’ve switched to The Unarchiver (Mac App Store link) because it supports more formats and offers easier customization options—and it’s just as free as Archive Utility.

When you launch The Unarchiver, its preferences window automatically opens to the Archive Formats tab. There you can see the software’s extensive format support, comprising 58 different file formats. Some, such as rar, are widely used, but you’ve probably never heard of some of the others—and are just as unlikely to encounter them.

This list is where you choose which formats you want The Unarchiver to handle. By default, zip and the other dozen or so other formats that OS X’s Archive Utility normally handles are unchecked, but by checking the box next to any of these, you can choose to have The Unarchiver deal with them instead. Handy 'Select All' and 'Deselect All' buttons let you make changes en masse.

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We all receive photos—scads of photos—via email, many of which we ignore because they’re not worth the bandwidth. But what if you want to show your kid that cute picture of a cat dressed up as a scuba diver—the one you got some past Halloween from who knows whom? As time passes, it’s harder to sort out, much less find and archive, such images. That’s where the appropriately titled Lost Photos (Mac App Store link) comes in.

A lightweight utility from Space Inch, Lost Photos (free; $3 to download unlimited photos) has a fresh, clean interface. The app connects to your IMAP email accounts using a secure connection and extracts all the photos from each account quickly and efficiently. Just type your email address and password into the Lost Photos window, and the app sifts through every message on the server, scraping up any photos it finds and placing them into a folder, named for that email account, on your drive for later viewing. (The app does not remove images from the mail server; it just finds and downloads them.)

The app provides some simple filters to help spare you the agony of viewing every company logo and headshot you receive: For example, the program can skip images under 8KB, as well as GIF files. (In my testing, it took about 25 minutes for the app to crawl through some 1300 email messages with these two options enabled.) You can also choose to ignore any images received before a particular date—so, for example, you can have Lost Photos search only messages received in the past two years.

Once Lost Photos finishes its search, the app offers buttons for adding all found images to iPhoto or showing your found photos in the Finder (where you can choose to manually import only some of them to iPhoto). You also get buttons for posting your found scuba-kitty image to Twitter or Facebook, emailing it to your friends, or posting it on Flickr.

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CleanMyMac 2, Macpaw’s catch-all utility offers scanning and cleanup of accumulated fluff—generally unused files and applications—on your Mac.

What kind of fluff is removed? Generally stuff you don’t think about that hangs around in the background. Similar to Disk Doctor (), CleanMyMac 2 hones in on items such as unused language support files, developer-oriented files, and service copies of your iPhoto images that add to the bulk of your iPhoto library. CleanMyMac 2 has seven different types of scans (Automatic Cleanup, System Cleanup, Large & Old Files, iPhoto Cleanup, Trash Cleanup, Extensions Manager, and Eraser), and each scan type is customizable, allowing you to configure what files are cleaned and removed.

CleanMyMac 2 generally removes stuff that won’t be missed, and if you’re feeling cautious—for example, you want to do a large-scale scan but leave OS X’s language files alone to ensure that upcoming software installations are smooth—just click CleanMyMac, choose Preferences, and specific elements of the scan can be configured from there.

CleanMyMac 2’s interface is a series of giant buttons and tutorial animations that greet you like a happy puppy. This proves both inviting and off-putting, as the interface consumes an enormous amount of screen real estate, but CleanMyMac 2 does pack some cool bells and whistles that become worth a second look. An uninstaller application comes in handy for removing applications with assorted support files scattered throughout the operating system, and a scheduler lets you assign designated times for the program to remind you to run tests.

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Those who’ve hooked up their MacBook to an external display are probably all too familiar with the dreaded dance of windows (not to be confused with George R.R. Martin’s bestselling A Dance with Dragons): You’ve got all your windows positioned exactly as you like them, then you disconnect your MacBook and blergh—windows every which way.

Sound familiar? Cordless Dog’s $15 Stay has the fix for what ails you. This menu-bar utility lets you save sets of window locations and sizes. So if you like your Twitter client pinned, just so, to the bottom-left corner of your screen, you can tell Stay to remember that window position—and here’s the key—both when you’re running your MacBook on its own and when it’s connected to your external display. If you want your IM client’s contact list to hug the right edge of the screen on your MacBook’s display but the left edge of your external display when it’s connected, Stay can do that too.

Better yet, you can have Stay automatically restore your windows whenever a display is connected and disconnected. So once you’ve chosen your favorite window positions, Stay does its thing transparently. (You can instead restrict Stay to being triggered manually, either using its systemwide menu or via a user-defined keyboard shortcut.) And if you’re particular about application window locations, you can choose to have Stay restore each app’s windows to particular sizes and locations whenever you launch that app.

Because Stay uses the names of windows to match them with the ones stored in your saved sets, the utility can have issues with windows whose titles change (for example, with text editors or Web browsers). You can fix that problem in one of two ways: by manually linking your current window to the one Stay has stored, using the Link Active Window To command in the app’s menu, or by setting up a window title pattern for Stay to look for.

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As a user of a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, I’ve developed a habit of switching the screen resolution based on the task at hand—and how much effort my eyes feel like expending. The Displays pane in OS X’s System Preferences utility doesn’t offer many screen resolution choices—just five on the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, four on the 13-inch model, to be exact—and it doesn’t offer an easy way to access those resolutions on the fly. So I use a third-party utility.

Fortunately, a number of resolution-switching utilities have debuted since Apple released its Retina-equipped laptops. The latest, Louder Than Ten's $5 Pupil gives you a systemwide menu; click it, and a list of available screen resolutions appears. Choose the resolution you want, and the screen changes. Simple.

Pupil functions like a lot of other similar utilities, but it also allows for customization of your list of screen resolutions. For example, if you have three different resolutions you like to use, you can choose to display only those three in Pupil’s menu—and put them in a preferred order. Other apps, such as QuickRes, display the whole list of available resolutions at all times—which I don’t mind, but it’s nice not to have to see options that you’ll never use. (Pupil’s settings screen claims that only the top six display modes will be available in the menu, but I was able to list more than six. The developer says that this incorrect text will be revised in an upcoming version of Pupil.)

On the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, Pupil provided me with access to 17 different screen resolutions, including 2880-by-1800 and 3840-by-2400. That’s a lot more than the five resolutions in OS X’s Displays pane, but far short of the 27 offered by QuickRes. More doesn’t necessarily mean better, though—chances are, the resolutions you need are in Pupil, and QuickRes offers resolutions you’ll likely never use. A representative for Pupil’s developer told me that the company decided to not show resolutions that don’t match the aspect ratio and color bit depth of the display.

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When I first reviewed Alfred, the app- and file-launching utility, back in early 2011, I praised it for its simplicity: You'd invoke the utility with a shortcut key-combination, type the first few letters of an application or file's name, and Alfred would find what you wanted and open it. It did more than OS X's built-in Spotlight feature—if not quite as much as other launchers such as Butler, Launchbar, or Quicksilver—without a lot of monkeying around.

But almost as soon as I wrote that review, Running With Crayons, the utility’s developer, began monkeying around with Alfred, adding powerful new features such as global hotkeys (which let you assign permanent keyboard shortcuts to files, apps, Web searches, and other things) and extensions (which let you quickly run AppleScripts, Automator workflows, complex file searches, and more) to the essentially simple app. With Alfred 2, that trend continues. This recent major update introduces a feature called workflows for performing more-complex series of actions.

Thankfully, this added power doesn’t compromise Alfred's appealing simplicity. You can still use Alfred to reliably find and launch files, apps, and Web searches without any complex configuration. But if you're willing to dig deeper, you might be pleasantly surprised by just how powerful this easy-to-use launcher can be.

When you activate Alfred using your chosen shortcut (I use Control+Space), you get a basic text-entry box. You start typing what you want there, and Alfred returns a list of possible hits. Scroll down that list (or use one of the displayed Command-number keyboard shortcuts) and select an item to open it. So far, this sounds just like Spotlight, right? But like other third-party launcher utilities, Alfred learns which apps you launch most frequently and puts the most-used ones at the top of the results list. (I wish it did so more reliably with files.)

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Most of us have evolved our own way of managing files. Some are obsessive about folders and folder hierarchies. Others are more free-form, relying on search to find the files we need. There’s a new free document-management tool for the Mac, called Doo, that could help both the filers and the searchers keep track of and find their files.

The basic premise is simple: You first tell Doo where your files are. Those locations can include your Documents folder, obviously, but also any folder on your hard drive or attached storage. Doo can also organize files stored on Google Drive and Dropbox, as well as email attachments in Gmail and other IMAP services (so if someone sends you an invoice as an attachment, it’ll show up in the app). You can also add files to Doo's database manually or via scanner or camera.

Once Doo knows where your files are, it then indexes them. By “index,” I mean it not only gathers the basic metadata (name, extension, date modified, and so on), but—if a file is in one of the file formats Doo supports—it can also index the contents. Those formats include the usual suspects (plain text, PDFs, Office and iWork docs, and HTML for example), but also some unexpected ones: Thanks to built-in OCR, it can index the text in image files, too. Indexing is done automatically and painlessly; when you add new docs, they get indexed without you doing a thing.

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Make no mistake: When you first launch iTunes 11, it’s going to feel awfully different from the iTunes you’ve grown accustomed to. That’s because it is awfully different, from many of the user interface choices right down to the brand new icon, which now even more strongly resembles that of the Mac App Store.

Edge-to-edge design

The first thing you’ll notice upon opening the new iTunes is that the sidebar—the one with links to your playlists, the iTunes Store, Books, Movies, Podcasts, and such—is gone. Apple describes the new look as an “edge-to-edge” design. Instead of using the sidebar, you rely on a dropdown for navigating between sections of the app, and a button at the upper right of the window takes you to the iTunes Store. But here’s a quick spoiler: If you can’t stand the dropdown approach, you can get the sidebar of old back. Go to the View menu and choose Show Sidebar. Bonus: The icons in the sidebar, which went to a faded grayscale in iTunes 10, regain their saturation in iTunes 11.

Another casualty of the “edge-to-edge” design is the status bar—you know, the one at the bottom that lists the number of songs in your library, or the current playlist, or what have you, along with how long it would take to play those songs and how much disk space they use. You can restore that as well with a trip to the View menu, by choosing Show Status Bar.

There’s a host of new user interface conceits in iTunes 11, making it seem almost like a testbed for Apple’s design. For example, the pop-up menus that appear when you click the black arrow button next to a song that you’ve selected feels more like something out of iOS than OS X. Clicking on a sub-menu item—Genius Suggestions, for example—doesn’t pop-open a sub-menu, but rather slides into a separate screen. Likewise, clicking on an album in the Album view slides open a list of songs in that album that resembles the iTunes Store (and includes a button that lets you quickly toggle over to that album in the store, as well).

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If you find recording audio from one of your Mac’s apps just too darn cumbersome, the audio experts at Rogue Amoeba have just the program for you. The company’s newest app is Piezo, a lightweight and easy to use audio recorder.

Piezo is designed for users who want to quickly and simply record some audio, whether it be from a microphone or from one of your Mac’s apps. (For example, say you want to record a Skype conversation, or something that’s playing in your Web browser.) Just select the source from the drop-down menu, pick your recording quality, and hit the big red button. Piezo’s realistic VU meters will light up and start bouncing to the rhythm as the seconds tick by. When you’re done, stop recording and click the magnifying glass that appears to reveal your file in the Finder. If nothing else, the application’s interface is gorgeous, evoking an actual recording console without slavishly adhering to skeuomorphic ideals.

Piezo supports capturing audio in 256-kbps and 128-kbps VBR stereo MP3, as well as 256-kbps, 128-kbps, and 64-kbps stereo AAC. Keep in mind that before Piezo can record audio from any currently running app, it’ll have to quit and relaunch that program. Rogue Amoeba’s more powerful (and pricier) Audio Hijack Pro sports an Instant On feature that can circumvent this requirement.

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Eat your heart out, Bruce Wayne: Now everybody can have their very own Alfred. The folks at Running with Crayons have officially released version 1.0 of their launcher utility.

The program was released as a beta back in March of 2010, and since then the developers have been beefing it up with additional features and capabilities.

In addition to launching apps, the free version offers many of the same abilities that you’ll find in competitors like Butler, LaunchBar, and Quicksilver. For example, you can search your Mac, search the Web, create custom Web searches for sites like Wikipedia, look up word spellings, perform calculations, and even issue system commands.

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We do hope you’re ready for another round of delicious Java updates, because Apple has just whipped up a batch for its Snow Leopard and Lion users.

Java for Mac OS X 10.7 Update 1, released Tuesday, updates the software to version 1.6.0_29, and offers Mac OS X Lion users improved reliability, security, and compatibility.

For Snow Leopard users running 10.6.8, Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 6 is the update to turn to. It also updates Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_29, and delivers similar improvements to that of the Lion version.

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Notifications have become a mainstay of modern computing. While people routinely only perform a single task, our computers continually juggle many, so knowing when our devices have carried out some job in the background has become a critical piece of data. While a notification makeover is a marquee feature of the soon-to-be-released iOS 5, Mac users have had their own notification platform for more than five years in the form of the open-source software Growl.

Growl 1.3, released Monday, boasts a number of changes, including new features and new rules for development. But its most significant change may be the fact the utility is now available from the Mac App Store—and only the Mac App Store.

What’s in store

That change of venue required some shifts. For example, rather than visit System Preferences to adjust Growl’s settings, as with earlier versions, you now simply launch the new Growl app. The Growl Project hopes this will, at least, partially solve the problem of confusing update reminders. All updates will instead be pushed through the Mac App Store’s own mechanism.

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There’s been a lot of fuss recently over the best way to stay healthy for those who sit in front of a desk all day. While some of my colleagues have chosen to go the whole nine yards and adopt a standing or even walking desk, not all of us want—or can afford—such a major adjustment in our workflow. Fortunately, there are still healthy options for the deskbound worker, such as excitedpixel’s BreakTime.

While standing may be a good option for keeping you healthier during your work day, the main thing is to stay active and move around. BreakTime helps remind you to get up regularly; at a specified interval, the app pops up a dialog box reminding you to get up and move around, again for an amount of time that you determine. In that, it’s not much different from many of its competitors, like Dejal’s Time Out, or Tinybird’s Break Reminder - Harmony.

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Toronto-based Agile Bits has released version 3.9 of 1Password, its popular identity management app for OS X. While the new release includes several enhancements and a few new features, the biggest news is that 1Password 3.9 is a Lion-only application, so users of pre-10.7 versions of OS X will have to stick with 3.8. The app is also built using a 64-bit architecture for maximum performance.

Among its new features, 1Password now sports a System Menu icon that can be used to control several aspects of the app without having to bring the program it to the foreground. The menu bar icon is not meant to replace 1Password’s existing browser extensions; instead, the two are meant to work hand-in-hand, with future updates to the extensions being released separately, to make it easier for Agile Bits to keep up with changes in browser software without having to update the entire app.

The move to Lion has also opened the door to a few enhancements that are specific to Apple’s newest desktop operating system. For example, 1Password can now run in full-screen mode, and uses a stricter security model to keep user data safe.

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My favorite TextExpander snippets

If you asked Macworld editors to name their favorite utilities, many of us would mention TextExpander. If you type for a living, as we do, TextExpander—or a similar app such as TypeIt4Me or QuicKeys—quickly becomes indispensable.

As you probably know, TextExpander and utilities like it enable you to insert fixed bits of text—which TextExpander calls snippets—by typing in short abbreviations. So, for example, you could create a snippet called Date that inserts the current date whenever you type in an abbreviation (I use .date) followed by a designated delimiter (I use the backslash key \). Once you start building a library of snippets, they quickly become an integral part of your workflow.

If you are already using TextExpander, I’m sure you already have an extensive library of snippets. But if you aren’t, or if you just got started, I thought I’d try to give you some idea of what you can do with the app, by showing you some of the snippets I use the most.

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Apple wants you to use iCloud as the location for your saved documents. If you aren’t willing to cooperate, Apple applies some pressure to get you to change your mind.

Case in point: The Open and (especially) the Save dialogs for apps that support OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion’s new Documents in the Cloud feature (also called iCloud Document Library). Apple has changed the rules here, as compared to how things worked in previous versions of OS X.

When you select to save a new Untitled document, the Save dialog opens with a folder location already selected. In OS X 10.7 Lion and all prior versions of OS X, if you’ve never changed this default location, it’s probably your Documents folder. If you do change the folder location, the app typically remembers your decision. This means the next time you attempt to save a new document, the default folder will be the location you last chose. This is what most users want and expect. So far, so good.

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Reader Mike Kohler seeks to update his troubleshooting kit now that he’s moved to Lion. He writes:

I installed Lion last week on my year-old iMac. I like to be prepared for disaster but with Lion I’m not sure what tools I should have. Can you help?

I don’t blame you for being a little hazy on this. Lion significantly changes the way we now install, troubleshoot, and repair our Macs. Allow me to give you a peek inside my Lion Toolbox.

Tool 1: Recovery HD partition When you install Lion on your Mac, the Lion installer creates a bootable partition called Recovery HD. You boot into this partition by holding down Command-R at startup or by holding the Option key and then choosing the Recovery HD partition that appears on screen.

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[Editor’s note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Lion.]

Apple this week released a free utility called Lion Recovery Disk Assistant that provides an easy method for creating an official Lion Recovery drive from any 1GB (or larger) USB hard drive or thumb drive. You can download Lion Recovery Disk Assistant from Apple’s Support site; it’s about 1MB in size. Apple provides some brief instructions for using this utility, but those instructions don't give you the whole story—while the utility is indeed simple to use, there's a lot more you should know about creating and using a recovery drive.

Why you need a recovery drive

A must-have for any Mac user is some sort of bootable utility disc or drive—I call it an emergency drive, while Apple’s taken to calling it a recovery drive. If your startup drive gives you trouble, you can boot from the recovery drive and in many cases perform any necessary repairs. With luck, you’ll be back up and running in no time.

As I explained in our hands-on with Lion Recovery, when you install Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) on a Mac with a supported hard-drive configuration, the Lion installer creates a hidden, 650MB partition called Recovery HD. You can boot your Mac from Recovery HD by holding down Command-R at startup (or by choosing it from within Startup Manager, which you access by holding down Option at startup); you’re then presented with options for verifying or repairing your normal startup drive and for reinstalling Lion. You can also browse the Web for troubleshooting info using Safari, and if worse comes to worst, you can even erase your startup drive and restore its contents from a Time Machine backup. Apple calls this feature Lion Recovery.

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While Time Machine gained a couple new features in Lion, I've just stumbled across one (so far as I know, undocumented) new piece of functionality in Apple's backup software that will have a lot of users cheering: You can now use a previous Time Machine disk with a new computer and inherit the entire backup history of the older machine. And it doesn't even require a flux capacitor.

Given Apple's attempt with Time Machine to make backups painless, the migration process is pretty easy: Plug your old Time Machine drive into a new computer and open the Time Machine preference pane in System Preferences. Lion will remind you that you haven't selected a backup drive and will present a dialog box with a button to open Time Machine Preferences as well as a new option: Use Previous Disk. Clicking on that will provide you with a list of mounted drives that contain Time Machine backups.

Once you've selected the older Time Machine drive and told your Mac to backup, you'll be given another choice: Create an entirely new backup or inherit the backup history of the old drive. In the latter case, your old computer's Time Machine backup will be migrated to work with the new computer. Be warned, though—as Lion points out, time travel is a tricky business: If you migrate the Time Machine backup to work with your new computer, you won't be able to use it with the older computer.

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Your Mac is capable of producing sound as well as playing sound channeled from outside sources—devices plugged into the Mac’s USB- and sound input ports as well as audio streamed from the Internet. Wouldn’t it be great if you could captures some of those sounds for later listening? You can. And you can for free with Soundflower. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Download Soundflower

The first step involves finding a way to grab audio playing in one application—a Web browser, for example—and route it to an application that can capture that audio. Cycling ’74’s free Soundflower is that way. Soundflower is a system extension that lets you channel audio from one application to another. For example, you can take the audio playing from a movie in your Web browser and channel it into QuickTime Player’s audio input where you then record it.

Step 2: Configure Soundflower

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With a second preview version now in the hands of app developers, Apple’s next generation of Mac OS X, called Lion (Version 10.7), appears to be on track for its planned release to the public this summer. The company has announced several new features for the upcoming Macintosh operating system (some of which are lifted straight from iOS, Apple’s mobile platform) including the following:

• A feature called Launchpad for organizing and launching apps, similar to the iOS home screen.
• A new Mission Control feature that combines the existing Mac OS X Dashboard, Exposé and Spaces features, as well as full-screen apps.
• The ability for apps to auto-save and auto-resume as in iOS, and a feature called Versions that saves multiple copies of files over time so you can easily revert to a previous iteration after you’ve made changes.
• Easier, more secure file sharing among Macs, with a feature called AirDrop.
• More advanced use of multitouch gestures (in the OS itself and available to app developers).
• An updated interface and improved search capabilities in Mail, Mac OS X’s built-in email client.
• The ability for more apps to run in full-screen mode for a distraction-free experience, as Apple’s iPhoto and iMovie do now.
• A curated Mac App Store that offers one-click app installation.

One of these items has already arrived, of course: The Mac App Store launched for users of Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Version 10.6) in January.

Although Lion is still months away, Mac users don’t need to wait to get advances similar to the ones planned for the new operating system. In fact, several third-party applications and services already exist to meet the same challenges that Apple is aiming to address with Lion.

These free and low-cost tools can help you get results similar to those provided by Lion’s Launchpad, Mission Control, systemwide auto-save, Versions, AirDrop, enhanced multitouch capabilities and new Mail layout. Most of the apps work with Snow Leopard and Leopard (Version 10.5); some are available for Tiger (Version 10.4) as well. I’ve also included a section on app store alternatives for Leopard and Tiger users, who don’t have access to the Mac App Store.

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Power users work their Macs faster than regular folk do for a variety of reasons. More important than a speedier processor is a speedier computist. Since your fingers are nearly always on the keyboard, controlling your computer that way—instead of taking your hands off the keys to control your mouse—can put you into the upper echelon of efficient Mac users.

Becoming a mouse-avoiding keyboard junkie is a learnable skill; it requires practice and memorization—especially muscle memory. Everyone knows a few keyboard shortcuts (like Command-P for print, or Command-Q for quit). Mastering more, along with other efficient ways to control your Mac without reaching for the mouse, will help you get your work done faster, leaving more time for Angry Birds.

Know the common keyboard shortcuts

Since keyboard shortcuts are the most obvious tool in the mouse avoider’s arsenal, you’ll want to nail those down first. Learn the basics: Command-X, -C, and -V for Cut, Copy, and Paste; Command-W to close a window; and Command-Tab to switch between open applications.

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Reader Lloyd Hanson would like to more easily move text between applications. He writes:

I have a number of e-mail messages I have written that I need to export, individually, into a word processor document (Microsoft Word or Pages). Short of using cut and paste, is there a method or script that will do this automatically?

There are a few options for doing this. One of the easiest is to open a new word processing document, move to Mail, select the text that you’d like to copy in an e-mail message, and drag the text to the open word processing document.

Or…

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