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
Mountain Lion’s notifications system and Notification Center are great for letting applications get your attention and present you with information; if you’re using Lion (OSX 10.7), the third-party utility Growl performs a similar function. But have you ever wished you could use these features to get your own attention—for example, to post a quick note or reminder without having to use a full-blown notes or calendar/reminder app, or to leave an onscreen note for yourself when you step away from your Mac?
That’s the idea behind Sticky Notifications (Mac App Store link), a simple but useful utility that lets you take advantage of Notification Center (in OS X 10.8) or Growl (in 10.7 or 10.8) to post simple reminder notifications. (In Lion, you don’t even need to have Growl installed—Sticky Notifications integrates the feature. If you have Growl installed in Mountain Lion, you can choose whether Sticky Notifications uses Growl or Notification Center.)
Sticky Notifications' new-reminder windowRead 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
When you’re using your Mac, currently running applications appear in the Dock, but there are many processes running invisibly in the background. Some of these are processes you’ve initiated yourself—for example, by adding them to the Login Items list in System Preferences—but others are running because the OS or some installer set them up to run in the background, either continuously or on a schedule. Specifically, many of these processes are controlled by an OS X feature called launchd, which uses special configuration files to determine which processes should be run, and when.
Many of these processes are good, and some are even necessary. For example, some backup programs use them to make sure your scheduled backups run at the appropriate time(s). But I personally want to know when an app or an installer sets up a new background process. Partly because I like to know as much about what’s going on with my Mac as possible, but also because as useful as the launchd system is, it can also be used for nefarious purposes: Someone with less-than-honorable intentions can use it to launch, or to keep running, malware or spyware.
How do you know when one of these background processes—in other words, a new launchd configuration file—is added? One solution is a clever utility called Automatic Launch Object Detection (ALOD for short), created by the Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg (CIRCL). This utility monitors all the locations that launchd configuration files (and other types of background programs) are stored:
For years, Rogue Amoeba’s Fission has been my go-to tool for manipulating audio files. Whenever I need to trim songs, splice tracks, edit voice recordings, fade tracks in or out, or create ringtones, Fission has been simple and efficient—once you’ve mastered the basics, you can do any of these tasks and more.
A big update, Fission 2, has been a long time coming, but it was worth the wait. In addition to an attractive new interface—with two themes, one dark and one light—it now supports FLAC files, and can convert files, alone or in batches, to and from any of the formats it supports: AAC, MP3, AIFF, WAV, FLAC, and Apple Lossless. Though it’s still not as versatile as the free XLD—which can convert multiple files at the same time, taking advantage of all available CPU capacity of your Mac—Fission’s file-conversion features will be sufficient for most users.
As with the original version, when you work with audio files in Fission 2, they’re edited in their original format; some audio-editing apps first convert files to, say, AIFF, and then later convert them back to their original format. Fission’s approach saves time and makes editing easier, as you can edit AAC or MP3 files without having to go back and forth to another format.
Before Mountain Lion’s introduction of Notification Center, Mac users often turned to a third-party app for receiving, collecting, and displaying alerts from their apps. That app, of course, was the once-free Growl. Now, though, we’re in a new era: Growl is a $2 app in the Mac App Store these days, and Notification Center duplicates a decent amount of the utility’s functionality.
Many apps, however, still support Growl but not Notification Center, including Adium, Propane, Coda, NetNewsWire, and Transmit. It seems silly to me to get some notifications in Growl when there’s an entire OS-level feature devoted to such notifications. Enter Bark.
Bark is just one of several utilities that pipe Growl notifications to Notification Center, so those alerts appear in Notification Center instead of as traditional Growl alerts. But Bark has two qualities that make it a slam dunk for me: It’s free, and it works precisely the way I’d like it to.
And while all Gems are by definition inexpensive, longtime readers also know that I sometimes write about a great deal or bundle that lets you get Gems at an even better price than usual.
When Postbox 2 () debuted, I thought it blew the doors off Apple Mail and Microsoft Exchange, offering solid performance and an arsenal of first-rate email features. Since then, Apple’s Mail has closed much of the feature gap, integrating its own versions of Postbox features such as quick replies and threaded conversations. In response, the new Postbox 3 focuses more on integration with other popular apps than on inventing new interface bells and whistles. And if it’s not quite as distinct from Apple Mail as its predecessor, it’s also considerably less expensive, at just $10.
Postbox 3 does add a few new interface touches, including a Favorites menu for frequently accessed folders, reminiscent of the similar feature in Apple Mail. But Postbox 3’s biggest draw is its close cooperation with Gmail and the Dropbox and Evernote services. Over IMAP or POP, the program recognizes Gmail labels and sorts your mail accordingly. It can use Gmail-style keyboard shortcuts, shuffle messages into your Gmail archive, and move detected dates within messages into your Google calendar(s).
If you’ve installed the Evernote OS X app and set up an account, you can take any message in Postbox and convert it into an Evernote note with the click of a button. The tags, subject, and text of my test notes were all correctly reflected in my Evernote account.
It seems like it was just yesterday that we kicked off our annual Summer of Mac Gems marathon, where we featured a quality, inexpensive Mac app every weekday. We got through a lot of different programs, from tools for managing your Instagram photos to battery saving utilities and everything in between. In case you missed a few, here’s our complete list of products from GemFest 2012.
System Enhancements
Gemini 1.1 combs through your folders and looks for duplicate files, spitting out snarky phrases while you wait.
