Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.
Instapaper has been a favorite app among iOS users since the app first launched in 2008. Now, Instapaper users have another choice when it comes to digesting their saved Instapaper articles with Readomator for Instapaper (Mac App Store link). The Instapaper client converts your saved Instapaper articles into podcasts with iTunes.
Launch Readomator, sign in with your Instapaper account, and you are greeted with a list of your saved Instapaper articles. Turn on the podcast switch, and iTunes launches and begins to convert your saved articles into podcasts, which you can then download in iTunes.
Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’sGemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.
If you’re the computer geek in the family, chances are you’ve become the family’s go-to for any technical problem. We’ve all experienced the two-hour phone calls—”No, mom, click the Apple. The APPLE. IN THE UPPER LEFT CORNER.”—and constant email back and forth. If you live close by, you may even end up making house calls.
Screen sharing and screencasts are a great way to avoid these lengthy conversations, and Screeny (Mac App Store link) offers a simple way to help you help your relatives and get on with your life.
Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’sGemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.
ReFind 1.1 (Mac App Store link) puts the folders and files you use most at your fingertips. Developers, designers, audio pros, or anyone who uses a large number of folders will welcome the ability to jump directly to a frequently used folder or file from within any application. Even better—you can do so without searching, or clicking through stacks of open Finder windows.
Once installed, ReFind watches which folders you use most often. It appears in the menu bar, and is accessible with a keystroke. Folders you work in a lot appear under Most Popular; you can also bookmark folders you use often. Or, open Hard Drive to browse your Mac’s startup disk, including the normally invisible directories used by Mac OS X. In the otherwise alphabetical folder list, those you use most often appear at the top. ReFind learns your behavior as you work, updating the list accordingly.
Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’sGemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.
Quicksilver, LaunchBar, Alfred, and LaunchMagic: if you’re a Mac power user, chances are you’ve tried at least one of these app launchers in the past. If you have, then you’ll be right at home with LaunchMagic 4(Mac App Store link), Chronos Software’s latest release in its productivity software suite.
In truth, LaunchMagic is more of a hybrid app launcher and organizer than merely a standalone launching app. The app has a visual style unlike others in its class, which helps it stand out in the crowded app launcher field.
Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.
When the Web was young, experts generally advised that browser cookies were harmless. That was before detailed user tracking across multiple sites and aggressive advertising targeting. You may appreciate the cookie that logs you into Amazon.com automatically, but you might be less eager to share your browsing habits with companies building detailed user profiles. Cookie Stumbler Standard (Mac App Store link for Cookie Stumbler Basic) finds browser cookies, including advertising and tracking ones, and gives you the option to delete them all, or inspect and banish them individually.
Like antivirus software, Cookie Stumbler combines an application with a subscription to regularly updated definition files. These definitions identify known advertising and tracking cookies, and delete them, based on your preferences. Cookie Stumbler currently supports ten browsers, including Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, iCab, and OmniWeb. It also scans Flash cookies set by Adobe Flash Player; flash cookies are not removed by a browser cleaning, even if Flash was invoked by a website.
Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.
Unless you’re Cinderella and spring-cleaning is done with the help of some music and mice friends, it’s a pain to dig through your hard drive to dump duplicate files. Gemini (Mac App Store link) attempts to make this process a little bit easier—and, dare I say, a little bit more fun. Gemini will comb through anything you tell it to, spitting out snarky phrases to keep you from getting too bored during the wait.
Once those files have been scanned, the app morphs into an iTunes-esque interface, showing you just where your dupes are hiding. Gemini’s sniffer engine is pretty good, matching the content of the duplicate rather than the file name alone—if you’ve named the same picture with two different titles, for instance, the app will still tie them together as duplicates.
Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’sGemFest 2012 series. Every weekday from mid June through mid August, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.
Two recent projects (editing a 700-page website and designing a small iPad app) had me wishing for a simple yet sophisticated drawing program that would let me illustrate the relationships within clusters of pages (for the former), and the flow of the interface (for the latter). Had I known about Shapes 2.6 (Mac App Store link) in time, it might have been the solution for both.
Shapes lets you draw organizational and flow charts with a variety of shapes, lines, and arrows. It has a beautiful, elegant-looking interface that is supremely Mac-like, with a multi-faceted Inspector that lets you tweak line widths and styles, line and fill colors, text, and even fill a shape with an image. Basic grouping, alignment, and lock/unlock commands help keep things neat. You can export your documents in several different image formats (.jpg, .gif, .png, and .tiff), as well as PDF.
