Chris Barylick is an Apple-Certified Macintosh Technician living in the San Francisco Bay Area. In his 25 years of tinkering with Macs, he has accidentally lit two (and counting) hard drives on fire. He also wouldn't mind being Gonzo the Muppet when he finally grows up. More by Chris Barylick
There has never been a great way to clear out the cruft on your Mac’s hard drive. Superfluous files, application caches, unused language files that have been languishing on your drive for years—they all take up storage space that you could dearly use, especially if your computer has a speedy (but limited-capacity) solid-state drive (SSD).
You can always use the tried-and-true method of manually sifting through your drive and deleting unnecessary files. But Fiplab has come up with an interesting approach to the problem with its $2 Disk Doctor 2.1 (Mac App Store link). Simply shut down any open applications, open Disk Doctor, and let it scan your drive, and the program then returns a listing of how much space is being used by applications each of several categories: Applications Caches, Application Logs, Downloads, Extra Languages, Mail Downloads, and Trash Can.
See the cruft that's devouring your drive space, broken down by category.Read more »
Dan writes about OS X, iOS, troubleshooting, utilities, and cool apps, and he covers hardware, mobile and AV gear, input devices, and accessories. He's been writing about tech since 1994, and he's also published software, worked in IT, and been a policy analyst. More by Dan Frakes
These days, I do quite a bit of Web browsing and link visiting on my iOS devices: I read RSS feeds using Reeder on my iPad and iPhone or Mr. Reader on my iPad; and I use iOS apps to browse Twitter and App.net. In many ways, I like these iOS apps better than their Mac equivalents, and because I usually have at least one iOS device with me, I find that I can catch up on news and other info when I’m say, waiting in line at the Post Office.
But when I come across a file—perhaps a new Mac app or a free music archive—I want to download, I’m stuck, because iOS doesn’t provide an easy way to download files. And oftentimes I want to use the file on my Mac anyway, so even if I could download it on my iPhone or iPad, I would then have to figure out how to transfer it over to my Mac.
Until recently, my workflow in such situations would be to copy the download URL on my iOS device, open a new message in Mail, and then email the URL to myself; when I got back to my Mac, I’d open the email message and click the download link. It worked, but it was a hassle.
Tom Negrino is the author of more than 40 books and a longtime contributor to Macworld. His latest book is iCloud: Visual QuickStart Guide, Second Edition (Peachpit Press, 2013). More by Tom Negrino
Everyone needs a great text editor—for those times when you need to clean up funky characters in a big text file downloaded from the Web, remove duplicates in a list, or make a particular change to a bunch of files at once. When such text-manipulation jobs land on your desk, you can make short work of them with Bare Bone Software’s TextWrangler. Even better, this powerful tool is free from either the Mac App Store or the Bare Bones website.
TextWrangler offers a large selection of text-manipulation features, many of which are available from the Text menu.
TextWrangler reads almost any file (including code files such as HTML and Markdown that contain plain text), but it saves only to plain-text files, and it doesn’t support styled-text formats such as RTF or Microsoft Word documents. TextWrangler shares this “pure” text-editor approach with its professional-grade sibling, the $50 BBEdit. Like BBEdit 10, TextWrangler 4.5 is now Retina-display ready.
Dan writes about OS X, iOS, troubleshooting, utilities, and cool apps, and he covers hardware, mobile and AV gear, input devices, and accessories. He's been writing about tech since 1994, and he's also published software, worked in IT, and been a policy analyst. More by Dan Frakes
I recently wrote about finding the best iPad keyboard, with a focus on Bluetooth keyboards that work with iOS devices. I devoted a section of that article to desktop/tablet keyboards that can perform double duty: These models serve as your Mac’s primary keyboard, but they can also be used to type on your iPad or iPhone while you’re sitting at your desk.
The thing is, there’s a good chance that you’ve already got a Mac keyboard you like, so these $50 to $200 keyboards are really an option only if you’re (a) in the market for a keyboard for your iPad or iPhone; and (b) in the market for a new keyboard for your Mac.
A less expensive solution is Houdah Software’s $5 Type2Phone (Mac App Store link). This clever utility lets you use your Mac’s current keyboard with the iOS device of your choosing. In fact, you can even use your Mac’s keyboard with your Apple TV. Type2Phone requires iOS 3.2 or later, or Apple TV software 5.2 or later.
Dan writes about OS X, iOS, troubleshooting, utilities, and cool apps, and he covers hardware, mobile and AV gear, input devices, and accessories. He's been writing about tech since 1994, and he's also published software, worked in IT, and been a policy analyst. More by Dan Frakes
But if you frequently type special characters, a more-convenient option is Characters (Mac App Store link). Whenever you need to “type” a special character, you just click Characters’s systemwide menu-bar icon or—my preferred method—press a keyboard shortcut.
Dan writes about OS X, iOS, troubleshooting, utilities, and cool apps, and he covers hardware, mobile and AV gear, input devices, and accessories. He's been writing about tech since 1994, and he's also published software, worked in IT, and been a policy analyst. More by Dan Frakes
Have you ever wondered just how fast your home or work network really is? Or needed to troubleshoot a network connection? There are some solid command-line (Terminal) tools, such as iperf, that let you do this, as well as a number of traditional Mac apps. But Speedy Net (Mac App Store link), which I discovered last year via Twitter, is my current tool of choice. It’s a little app that does one thing, but does it well and simply: It lets you test the performance of a network connection between two Macs (or, using the $1 Speedy Net iOS app, between any combination of Macs and iOS devices).
Speedy Net testing two Macs
Launch Speedy Net on two Macs on your network—it works only over a local network—and, assuming the Macs can see each other, each will show up in the Network Devices list on the other. On either end, select a connection to test, choose the amount of data to transfer (10GB, 1GB, 500MB, or 100MB), and click Start Test. You’ll see a progress bar as the data is transferred, along with live-updated data on network speed (in Mbps), latency (in ms), and time (in minutes and seconds). When the test finishes, you see the overall results.
Dan writes about OS X, iOS, troubleshooting, utilities, and cool apps, and he covers hardware, mobile and AV gear, input devices, and accessories. He's been writing about tech since 1994, and he's also published software, worked in IT, and been a policy analyst. More by Dan Frakes
OS X Mountain Lion’s iOS-inspired Notification Center feature lets applications alert you to important events. But there’s more Notification Center could do—with the right apps. For example, if you’ve installed Growl and the excellent HardwareGrowler (Mac App Store link), you can get notifications for things such as peripheral connections and disconnections.
Notifi (Mac App Store link) looks to leverage Notification Center similarly. Like HardwareGrowler, Notifi is a small app that does nothing on its own; rather, it watches your Mac for particular events and then uses Notification Center to alert you to those events.
Using Notifi’s preferences window, you can choose which types of events you want notifications for. Enable the Devices Added/Removed option, and you’ll be notified whenever a volume is mounted or unmounted. (Unlike with HardwareGrowler, Notifi doesn’t watch for all peripheral connections and disconnections—just the mounting and unmounting of volumes.) When a volume is mounted, the notification you see includes information about the size of the drive and how much of that space is currently filled. When a drive is unmounted, you see when it’s safe to unplug.
