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.
Sleep Monitor is a utility that tracks your Mac’s sleep and battery cycles. While several similar battery-tracking apps exist in the Mac App Store, few offer Sleep Monitor’s visual graph, which is the most important feature of the app.
The app tracks when your Mac goes to sleep and wakes up, as well as how long it remains in both states. It also tracks your battery levels, including how long it takes the battery to fully charge and drain. Sleep Monitor tracks usage on a daily basis, but can only be viewed as hour-by-hour. It does, however, include the options to show weekly, monthly, or all-time statistics.
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 need to find which of your files have changed in a folder full of sub-folders and files; this is especially useful for developers looking to see which files have changed in a project, or for web designers needing to find which files have been updated. With files, you may want to look at changes in source code, HTML code, or other data.
VisualDiffer (Mac App Store link) is a simple, drag-and-drop tool that performs these comparisons and displays the results in a two-pane window, with one file or folder on each side. Drag a folder onto each side of the window and click on Show Diffs to find which files are different. You can check for differences by file content, by size, by timestamp and more. I tried a number of different folders, and comparing my iTunes Music folder with a backup, it took VisualDiffer about 30 seconds to scan some 65,000 files and find ones that had not yet been backed up.
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.
PhotoSweeper (Mac App Store link) is a handy utility for quickly organizing photos on your Mac. The app aims to help trim down your photo library by analyzing your photos and finding duplicate and similar images.
Here’s how it works: Drag and drop single images or entire folders of images into the app (you can add images from almost any location on your computer—iPhoto, Apperture, Lightroom, and even external devices), and then specify how you want to compare these images. PhotoSweeper quickly analyzes them to find similar and duplicate images, which are grouped together. From there, you can move, delete, or rename your images.
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.
Code529’s SideFolders 1.6.0 (Mac App Store link) is an app for maximizing folder organization on your desktop. The app provides a slide-out panel that combines a Finder window’s sidebar with the Apple menu’s Recent Items list. Plus, it lets you create your own lists so you can have any folder/document hierarchy you want in the panel without changing the locations of the actual folders and documents. A double-click on an item opens it without requiring a trip to the Finder and drilling down through subfolders; even better, you can drag a file from the resizable panel directly into a document you’re working on if the app supports that file type. This latest version supports QuickLook, so you’ll be able to check the document before you drag it anywhere.
Unfortunately, SideFolders’s glitches nearly outweigh its handy benefits. It doesn’t play well with Mission Control’s multiple Desktops, since dragging something to the edge of the screen moves you to another Desktop instead of triggering the SideFolders panel (unless you’re very, very careful where you stop). Its Applications and Recent (for documents) lists are in no discernable order—not alphabetical, most recently used, or frequency of use. It uses a Places category (passé since Lion roared in) that more or less matches items in the Finder’s sidebar, but not in the same order.
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.
With the rise of cloud services that store our media away from our computers, it’s easy to lose track of that picture you uploaded to Facebook, or that one important note you wrote for yourself in Google Docs five months ago.
SocialFolders is designed to bring your cloud data back onto your computer. To do so, link your social accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Google Docs, and Twitter, to name a few) with the SocialFolders website, and then download the SocialFolders app, which syncs all of your media to a set of folders on your Mac. With many services, you’re able to both upload and download media just by dragging and dropping files into the relevant folder.
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.
Mac OS X does a lot behind the scenes, and it records many of its operations and errors in log files. You can access these log files through an included Mac utility called Console. Console logs can help you track down problems on your Mac, but Console offers a Spartan display, and its sorting options are limited.
Log Leech (Mac App Store link) steps in to remedy this. It reads these log files and presents them in a much more usable manner. The application can group log entries by application or process, something you can only do in Console by running searches. (Though Console lets you save log queries, which work like multi-criteria smart searches.) You can also sort by application name, date or number of entries; the latter lets you find which applications or processes have written the most log entries.
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.
Apimac’s Timer for Mac 7.0 is for hardcore timer and alarm clock users. There are far cheaper timer apps available in the Mac App Store (including Apimac’s freeware version of the same app), but Timer Pro has some surprising functions that make it a stand-out app.
Hide or display all of Timer Pro's events by clicking the Info button (shown in blue).Timer Pro has three modes: Stopwatch, Countdown, and Alarm Clock (and all three modes work pretty much just as you’d expect). Blow the window up full screen, keep it to a medium rectangle, or iconize it. Toggling the info button either hides or shows the events you’ve performed in the app, which you could export to calendars or other apps if you wanted. Clicking the “+” button adds timers, so you could have several different timers and clocks going at once. You can choose from 14 different alarm tones, choose the amount of rings you want, and have the option to display an alert box.
