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.
Lex uses a MacBook Pro, an iPhone 5, an iPad mini, a Kindle 3, a TiVo HD, and a treadmill desk, and loves them all. His latest book, a children's book parody for adults, is called "The Kid in the Crib." Lex lives in New Jersey with his wife and three young kids. More by Lex Friedman
To say I use Twitter begrudgingly isn’t quite right. When I first joined the microblogging service in February 2007, I wasn’t impressed and didn’t stick around. I came back to the service in earnest a couple years later, and it’s become a daily go-to place for me. I use it professionally and personally, and so do many of the folks I follow. It’s full of quips and silliness, but also great information and insight. So it’s fair to say that I’ve come to love Twitter, the service.
But I feel far less warmly towards Twitter, the company, which has started making life much more difficult for the third-party developers whose apps work with the service. That’s a shame, because I’ve repeatedly been impressed by the innovation and design that characterize the best Twitter clients, and the company’s actions put the development of such apps in jeopardy.
The OS X text-editor market is burgeoning, especially with the advent of the Mac App Store and the capability to store documents on iCloud (and otherwise in the cloud). These writing apps range from minimalist text editors with few options to relatively powerful tools that approach the feature sets of word processors. MOApps’ $7 Write 2 (; Mac App Store link) straddles the line between a simple text editor and a more-powerful word processor. It manages to not cross that line, stopping short of overwhelming you with too many features.
To start with, Write 2 has an uncluttered, alluring interface. A simple toolbar provides access to the most-important settings you’d want in a text tool: font, size, line spacing, character styles, and alignment. A Command button—it sports the actual ⌘ symbol—at the right edge of the toolbar displays a menu with many less-frequently used settings. A styles button at the left edge of the toolbar lets you choose and configure styles.
Styles, common to text behemoths like Word and Pages, are one of the features that make Write 2 stand out from many other inexpensive text tools. Styles allow you to quickly apply a set of commonly-used character and paragraph settings—for example, a particular font, text size, alignment, and more. You can either click the styles button and choose a style, or you can choose Write 2 Styles (or press Control-Tab) to display a small window that shows what all your configured styles look like.
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 usually cover one Gem per column, but today I’ve got two simple apps that complement iTunes. One is an update to a previous Gem, and the other is new for Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).
Skip Tunes 2.0.1
Back in February, I reviewed Skip Tunes 1.0, an inexpensive ($1 at the time) menu-bar controller and information display that works with the iTunes, Spotify, and Rdio apps. Skip Tunes puts a tiny controller in the menu bar that shows three buttons: play/pause, skip (hence the utility’s name), and a music icon. The idea is that you get a quick-and-easy way to pause or skip—the most common music-listening actions—without having to switch to your music app. As a bonus, clicking the music-note icon displays the current track’s album art, as well as track information, a progress bar, and a more-complete set of controls: skip back, play/pause, and skip forward.
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.
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