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
As a user of a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, I’ve developed a habit of switching the screen resolution based on the task at hand—and how much effort my eyes feel like expending. The Displays pane in OS X’s System Preferences utility doesn’t offer many screen resolution choices—just five on the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, four on the 13-inch model, to be exact—and it doesn’t offer an easy way to access those resolutions on the fly. So I use a third-party utility.
Fortunately, a number of resolution-switching utilities have debuted since Apple released its Retina-equipped laptops. The latest, Louder Than Ten's $5 Pupil gives you a systemwide menu; click it, and a list of available screen resolutions appears. Choose the resolution you want, and the screen changes. Simple.
Once you customize your settings, changing resolutions is as easy as choosing one from Pupil's systemwide menu.Read more »
When I first reviewed Alfred, the app- and file-launching utility, back in early 2011, I praised it for its simplicity: You'd invoke the utility with a shortcut key-combination, type the first few letters of an application or file's name, and Alfred would find what you wanted and open it. It did more than OS X's built-in Spotlight feature—if not quite as much as other launchers such as Butler, Launchbar, or Quicksilver—without a lot of monkeying around.
But almost as soon as I wrote that review, Running With Crayons, the utility’s developer, began monkeying around with Alfred, adding powerful new features such as global hotkeys (which let you assign permanent keyboard shortcuts to files, apps, Web searches, and other things) and extensions (which let you quickly run AppleScripts, Automator workflows, complex file searches, and more) to the essentially simple app. With Alfred 2, that trend continues. This recent major update introduces a feature called workflows for performing more-complex series of actions.
Thankfully, this added power doesn’t compromise Alfred's appealing simplicity. You can still use Alfred to reliably find and launch files, apps, and Web searches without any complex configuration. But if you're willing to dig deeper, you might be pleasantly surprised by just how powerful this easy-to-use launcher can be.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Both digital cameras and iPhoto have been around long enough that few long-time Mac users have what you would call an entirely manageable iPhoto library. Their libraries are instead often bloated, full of duplicates, or so ungainly that some have opted to simply create new libraries rather than slogging through an old and slow one. Apple has made little provision for these issues: Unlike with iTunes, iPhoto has no Find Duplicates command; and although you can create a new library by holding down the Option key while launching iPhoto and clicking Create New, you can’t merge libraries or easily copy images between them.
In Apple’s world, this is considered a “rich third-party opportunity” and, in this case, that opportunity has been seized by Fat Cat Software with its $30 iPhoto Library Manager, an application that allows you to easily create and manage multiple iPhoto libraries, browse the images within multiple libraries, copy images between libraries, locate duplicate images within and across libraries, merge libraries, and rebuild corrupt libraries. We first reviewed iPhoto Library Manager way back in 2006; it's been updated many times since then.
iPhoto Library Manager’s interface is reminiscent of iPhoto—much more so today than when we last looked at the utility. In the toolbar, you find the application’s major commands—Create Library, Add Library, Remove Library, Reveal Library, Quit iPhoto, Find Duplicates, and Merge Libraries. Additionally, you can choose to browse the selected library as thumbnail images or in a list, with the latter providing metadata information such as title, date taken, keywords, place, and rating. (You needn’t launch iPhoto to view this info.) A Search field rounds out the toolbar.
Chris Barylick is an Apple-Certified Macintosh Technician living in the San Francisco Bay Area. In his 25 years of tinkering with Macs, he has accidentally lit two (and counting) hard drives on fire. He also wouldn't mind being Gonzo the Muppet when he finally grows up. More by Chris Barylick
There has never been a great way to clear out the cruft on your Mac’s hard drive. Superfluous files, application caches, unused language files that have been languishing on your drive for years—they all take up storage space that you could dearly use, especially if your computer has a speedy (but limited-capacity) solid-state drive (SSD).
You can always use the tried-and-true method of manually sifting through your drive and deleting unnecessary files. But Fiplab has come up with an interesting approach to the problem with its $2 Disk Doctor 2.1 (Mac App Store link). Simply shut down any open applications, open Disk Doctor, and let it scan your drive, and the program then returns a listing of how much space is being used by applications each of several categories: Applications Caches, Application Logs, Downloads, Extra Languages, Mail Downloads, and Trash Can.
See the cruft that's devouring your drive space, broken down by category.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
These days, I do quite a bit of Web browsing and link visiting on my iOS devices: I read RSS feeds using Reeder on my iPad and iPhone or Mr. Reader on my iPad; and I use iOS apps to browse Twitter and App.net. In many ways, I like these iOS apps better than their Mac equivalents, and because I usually have at least one iOS device with me, I find that I can catch up on news and other info when I’m say, waiting in line at the Post Office.
But when I come across a file—perhaps a new Mac app or a free music archive—I want to download, I’m stuck, because iOS doesn’t provide an easy way to download files. And oftentimes I want to use the file on my Mac anyway, so even if I could download it on my iPhone or iPad, I would then have to figure out how to transfer it over to my Mac.
Until recently, my workflow in such situations would be to copy the download URL on my iOS device, open a new message in Mail, and then email the URL to myself; when I got back to my Mac, I’d open the email message and click the download link. It worked, but it was a hassle.
Tom Negrino is the author of more than 40 books and a longtime contributor to Macworld. His latest book is iCloud: Visual QuickStart Guide, Second Edition (Peachpit Press, 2013). More by Tom Negrino
Everyone needs a great text editor—for those times when you need to clean up funky characters in a big text file downloaded from the Web, remove duplicates in a list, or make a particular change to a bunch of files at once. When such text-manipulation jobs land on your desk, you can make short work of them with Bare Bone Software’s TextWrangler. Even better, this powerful tool is free from either the Mac App Store or the Bare Bones website.
TextWrangler offers a large selection of text-manipulation features, many of which are available from the Text menu.
TextWrangler reads almost any file (including code files such as HTML and Markdown that contain plain text), but it saves only to plain-text files, and it doesn’t support styled-text formats such as RTF or Microsoft Word documents. TextWrangler shares this “pure” text-editor approach with its professional-grade sibling, the $50 BBEdit. Like BBEdit 10, TextWrangler 4.5 is now Retina-display ready.
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 recently wrote about finding the best iPad keyboard, with a focus on Bluetooth keyboards that work with iOS devices. I devoted a section of that article to desktop/tablet keyboards that can perform double duty: These models serve as your Mac’s primary keyboard, but they can also be used to type on your iPad or iPhone while you’re sitting at your desk.
The thing is, there’s a good chance that you’ve already got a Mac keyboard you like, so these $50 to $200 keyboards are really an option only if you’re (a) in the market for a keyboard for your iPad or iPhone; and (b) in the market for a new keyboard for your Mac.
A less expensive solution is Houdah Software’s $5 Type2Phone (Mac App Store link). This clever utility lets you use your Mac’s current keyboard with the iOS device of your choosing. In fact, you can even use your Mac’s keyboard with your Apple TV. Type2Phone requires iOS 3.2 or later, or Apple TV software 5.2 or later.
