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.
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.
There are times when you may want to change certain Finder attributes on specific files, like the creation or modification dates. You may want to apply Finder labels to a number of files in folders and sub-folders without performing the operation for each group of files manually. Or you may want to lock or unlock files, or perhaps remove invisible files.
For photographers, settings to adjust EXIF timestamps, or match them to file creation dates, can be useful, so photos can be sorted in the Finder by the date they were shot, rather than the date they were imported. Web designers might want to adjust file creation dates as well, so they show up on a server correctly. And anyone who uses Finder labels may want to apply labels to a group of files or folders with a single click.
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.
It seems like just about every app on my Mac wants Internet access today, and sometimes I want more control over which apps have that instant access. Radio Silence is just the tool for the job. It’s a powerful yet easy to use firewall that lets users block applications from accessing the Internet.
It is perhaps the easiest firewall I’ve ever used. To silence, or block, an app like Spotify, for example, I opened Radio Silence and chose Spotify from my applications folder. That was the entire process. I then loaded Spotify and confirmed that Spotify was unable to access the Internet.
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.
No matter how hard you try to keep your iTunes library tidy, sooner or later you’ll find cobwebs growing in its corners. TrackSift 1.2.2 (Mac App Store link) helps you take a broom and dustpan to the far reaches of your digital music collection.
For a set of iTunes-tweaking Perl scripts, TrackSift offers a handsome front end. Creator Doug Adams has given it a clean, pleasantly animated interface that occasionally gets crowded, but always presents its options clearly. The program takes a minute or so to scan your library the first time it opens, plus a few seconds on each subsequent launch, but the delay never proved tedious.
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.
We all have tasks that we carry out repeatedly, which we know we could simplify if we had the time and inclination. Aptonic Limited's Dropzone (Mac App Store link) helps remove those obstacles for many jobs, letting you quickly perform custom actions on files that you drag into either its menubar icon or onto its pop-out Circles.
Dropzone's preference lets you configure destinations for your files (or for bits of text, URLs, and other sorts of data); by default, these actions are relatively simple ones, such as compressing the file into a zip archive and attaching it to an email, or moving the file to your Downloads folder. One clever action even lets you drag a disk image onto it, which lets Dropzone mount the image, copy the app to your Applications folder, and unmount the disk image and move it to your trash, all in a matter of seconds.
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.
ImageOptim 1.4.0 helps not just the developers and designers who use the software, but also any of those users’ users, too. Let me explain: The free utility takes in your PNG, JPEG, and GIF files (including GIF animations) and optimizes them by shrinking their file sizes, often considerably. And it does so without affecting the image quality.
That’s all it does, but that one feature makes ImageOptim tremendously useful to Web developers and iOS and Mac app developers. Keeping file sizes down by shrinking images without any loss in quality can quickly become a big deal: It saves bandwidth for everybody, and the numbers can add up quickly. (Shave a few hundred kilobytes off your popular website’s homepage, and you could save gigabytes of bandwidth over the course of a year.
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.
We’ve covered a good number of Gems that can display your laptop’s battery status in the menu bar. But Battery Status (Mac App Store link) offers a unique twist that will appeal to Mac laptop and desktop users who also own Apple’s Magic Trackpad, Magic Mouse, or Wireless Keyboard. It offers information about the battery status of each of those devices, as well.
Battery Status’s menu icon displays a graphical representation of the battery level of one of the supported devices or, for MacBook users, your laptop’s battery level—you choose which in the app’s preferences window. Alternatively, you can choose to have the icon automatically display the level of the battery with the lowest remaining percentage of a full charge. You can also choose to display the numerical percentage next to the icon, and you can choose whether that icon should be black and white or use colors (green for a good charge, red for almost empty, and yellow for a range somewhere in the middle).
