Glenn Fleishman writes about technology crossed with culture for The Economist's Babbage blog as G.F., and is a senior contributor to Macworld. He is the author of many books in the Take Control series. More by Glenn Fleishman
Our Macs can be chatty even when we wish they weren’t. Apps, and even the OS itself, regularly reach out to the rest of your local network and to the Internet to probe, query, and blab. Little Snitch 3 intercepts these requests and presents them to you for inspection and approval. The latest update to the software adds inbound-connection management, too. Little Snitch has graduated from being a sort of outbound-only firewall with notifications to being a full-fledged firewall product with a friendly interface that informs you about any network-related activities.
OS X’s built-in firewall, when enabled, functions based on services and applications, allowing only inbound connections aimed at particular pieces of software—for example, a connection to iPhoto’s shared-library service. But the OS X firewall can’t be configured to allow a connection from a particular Internet protocol (IP) address. Little Snitch offers this type of functionality, but it reveals this power in stages, allowing a simple approach for those who want security without fuss, while using configurable rules to provide levels of deeper and deeper access for those who want more-precise control.
A dialog explains that BBEdit is trying to reach a remote server. You have many options to control whether this connection is blocked, and for how long and to what degree of specificity.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
With Thanksgiving upon us, it’s time for the annual avalanche of Black Friday sales—and Pre-Black Friday sales, and Cyber Monday sales, and Weekend-Before-Cyber Monday sales, and…you know the drill. But most of those sales, whether online or in physical stores, focus on hardware and gear. If you’re looking for some great Mac software, either for yourself or for your favorite gift recipient, there are currently two big Mac-software bundles, each offering a bevy of apps for one reasonable price. Even if you just wanted the Mac Gems each bundle contains, both are bargains, but each also includes a bunch of other good software that sweetens the pot considerably. (All apps included in these bundles are full versions.)
Productive Macs Bundle
The Productive Macs bundle (available until November 30) includes nine apps for a total of $30, compared to $239 if purchased separately at regular prices:
Jeffery Battersby is an Apple Certified Trainer, (very) smalltime actor, and regular contributor to Macworld. He writes about Macs and more at his blog, jeffbattersby.com. More by Jeffery Battersby
I’m a big fan of simple personal-finance applications—the kind you can use to quickly collect your purchase and deposit information and then easily reconcile that information with your bank account when it’s convenient. FadingRed’s $30 Koku, available for both Mac and iOS, hits almost all those marks, making it easy to track your financial information at your desk or on the go, as well as to get a summary of your current financial status. It falls short only when it comes time to reconcile your debits and credits at the end of the month.
Koku for Mac has a simple interface. The app’s left side, called the Library, displays a list of your accounts, a collection of pre-defined and user-created reports, Smart Lists of transactions, and folders for organizing your report data.
The Mac version of Koku shows you visual reports on your finances.Read more »
Pity the poor menu bar. It seems like just about every app you install these days wants to put a little icon up there, often to little real advantage. It’s not uncommon for that ever-expanding line of icons on the right to extend under the reach of the menus on the left. In short, the menu bar is a mess.
That’s the problem that Bartender is here to solve. Yes, it adds a menu-bar item of its own. But within that menu item you can hide other menu-bar icons that you don’t want to see all the time. The utility also lets you rearrange menu-bar items—OS X lets you rearrange only Apple’s menu extras.
Jeffery Battersby is an Apple Certified Trainer, (very) smalltime actor, and regular contributor to Macworld. He writes about Macs and more at his blog, jeffbattersby.com. More by Jeffery Battersby
On the surface, Hog Bay Software’s $25 FoldingText (Mac App Store link) is a basic text editor. In fact, if you don’t dig too deep, you could easily be fooled into thinking that FoldingText is too simple to merit more than a passing glance. The reality is that FoldingText is an amalgam. A polyvalent text-editing powerhouse. Part text editor, part to-do-list maker, part outliner, part Pomodoro-method task manager, FoldingText is like and unlike every text editor you’ve used.
Each new document you create using FoldingText starts out the same way, not as a blank slate for you to begin typing text, but as as Welcome document explaining the basics of how FoldingText works. That may seem odd for something as basic as a text editor, but within FoldingText, basic text can undergo some amazing transformations, and understanding how to transform that text is essential to getting the most out of the app. This initial document is designed to help you start on the right foot.
FoldingText uses Markdown to transform your plain text into someting more useful; you can quickly jump to any header.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
Last week, we reviewed QuickRes, a menu-bar utility for changing the resolution of—and accessing higher resolutions on—Retina-display MacBook Pros. But even if you aren't using a Retina display, you may have wanted something similar, because Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) is missing a convenient feature found in older versions of OS X: the Displays menu extra.
Under Lion (OS X 10.7) and earlier, a simple click in the menu bar let you change screen resolutions and, if you had multiple displays, toggle display mirroring. Mountain Lion includes an option, in the Displays pane of System Preferences, to enable a Mirroring menu (for AirPlay mirroring, not dual-display mirroring), but that menu is missing resolution options—and it appears only when an AirPlay-mirroring-capable Apple TV is available on the local network.
I've been accessing resolution settings by pressing Option and either of my keyboard's Brightness keys—a shortcut that opens the Displays pane of System Preferences. But a more convenient approach can be found in Milch im Gemüsefach's free Display Menu (Mac App Store link).
Roman has covered technology since the early 1990s. His career started at MacUser, and he's worked for MacAddict, Mac|Life, TechTV, PC/Computing, and Windows NT Systems. More by Roman Loyola
Apple’s 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro has a problem: OS X doesn’t allow users to easily take full advantage of the Retina display. Specifically, OS X doesn't provide a simple, quick way to switch between the many supported screen resolutions; in addition, the Retina display supports higher resolutions than OS X provides access to. Fortunately, several developers offer software tools to fix this problem, and the one I’ve come to favor is Inertiactive’s QuickRes.
QuickRes 2.2 provides access to screen resolutions with a right-click on its menu bar icon.
QuickRes can appear in your Mac’s menu bar; a few other display utilities may offer a menu bar option, but OS X’s Displays system preferences doesn’t, and neither does a utility I previously used called Change Resolution. In addition to the standard five resolutions that are available in the Displays pane of System Preferences, QuickRes on the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro lets you access 22 additional resolution settings—for a whopping total of 27 available resolutions—including the native 2880 by 1800 resolution and two even-higher resolutions, 3360-by-2100 and 3840-by-2400. Right-clicking the QuickRes menu-bar icon shows you all of these resolutions, letting you quickly choose any of them.
