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.
Daypart, a desktop app that lets you schedule playtimes for your iTunes playlists, is the Ron Popeil of the Mac music universe—just “set it, and forget it.”
This app operates in multiple windows. In the main window, you schedule when you want certain playlists to play. This includes regular playlists, smart playlists, and Genius playlists—the variety means you can also schedule when you want online radio stations to begin playing during the day. You choose the days and times you want the playlists to start; you have the option of choosing when iTunes should stop playing, as well. Either let the last song play to completion, or fade it out as its scheduled playing time ends. Playlists can also be set to “shuffle” mode.A view of Daypart's three windows.
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.
As Internet Service Providers (ISPs) increasingly impose monthly data caps to consumer accounts, users who stream video, play online games, or just use the Internet a lot, find themselves at risk of incurring unexpected fees. You can avoid these fees by keeping track of how much data you use. NetUse Traffic Monitor (Mac App Store link) keeps an eye on your Internet activity, displays it on a graph, and provides alerts to keep you out of the bandwidth poorhouse.
NetUse Traffic Monitor uses Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to acquire network traffic information, usually from the router that delivers Internet data to your wired and wireless devices. Many modern consumer-grade wireless and wired routers (including Apple’s Airport Extreme, AirPort Express, and Time Capsule) support SNMP. Be sure that your router supports SNMP, and that SNMP is enabled in your settings. (DewDrop Studios provides a free utility, SNMP Test, which you can use to verify your router’s compatibility.)
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.
MacPaw’s CleanMyMac is an extremely easy to use cleaning tool for your Mac. The default settings tell the app to scan your Caches, Logs, Language Files, Universal Binaries, System Junk, and Trashes & Leftovers. When I tested the app, I left all of those boxes checked, but you do have the option to uncheck anything you don’t need to be cleaned up. Click the bright green “Scan” button, and the app gets right to work. Once the scan is completed, you again have the option to uncheck any of the boxes before cleaning. Then, click the bright blue “Clean” button.
A few minutes later, CleanMyMac informed me that the cleaning was completed, and 1.26 GB of space was recovered—not very much. I went into Preferences and check-marked a few more items, performed the Scan and Clean again, and knocked out another 0.06 GB—again, not a big deal. Then, I noticed that a few items were lurking in Trashes & Leftovers that had not yet been cleared. Clicking on it revealed another menu; you must specifically checkmark each of the items for a complete deletion. One more cleanse and the total amount of space recovered was 6.69 GB. Perhaps that’s still not a ton of space in the scheme of things—but I tend to keep my Macs pretty clean to begin with. Overall, it was an easy way to get rid of some junk on my computer and clear a little space.
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.
If you frequently use Apple’s iBooks Author or iWork apps (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), Token 1.3.1 (Mac App Store link) can make your life slightly easier by giving you faster access to your documents, templates (or themes), and scripts.
Token appears as an unobtrusive system-wide menu bar icon. A Recent submenu gives you one-click access to recent documents from any of the aforementioned apps; you can set how many recent documents appear and how they’re sorted—and you can Command-click any file to show it in the Finder. Unlike the File -> Open Recent submenus in these apps (and the Recent Items submenu of the Apple menu), which list the most recently opened files, Token lists the most recently modified files.
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.
Sometimes, the best apps are those that are really good at doing only one thing. Cross Forward Consulting’s InstaBackup (Mac App Store link) does just that. It’s a simple utility for Instagram users who want an easy way to back up their Instagram photos.
The $1 app is a handy utility that’s well suited to Instagram power-users who want to back up their favorite lo-fi photos, or those who simply want a quick pain-free way to transfer their Instagram photos to their Mac.
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.
As a ham-fisted Mac user, I occasionally press Command-Q by accident. I don’t lose any work—since OS X Lion does automatic backups, and I still have that twitch in my fingers that presses Command-S to save my work often, I’m protected. But I occasionally end up quitting apps like iChat, my Twitter client, or my RSS reader by accidentally pressing Command-Q.
CommandQ steps in to protect those of us with fat fingers. Its actions are simple: it blocks the Command-Q shortcut, displaying a bezel with a progress bar on screen. You have to keep holding the Command and Q keys until the progress bar reaches the end to quit an application. In the app’s preferences, you can set this time from a half-second to two seconds. You can also set your own Quit keystroke, which turns out to be necessary if you’re not using a QWERTY keyboard layout.
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.
I’m a creature of habit. No matter how many times I try to make a Google Reader client for Mac part of my daily routine, I always seem to go back to Google’s web interface. Don’t get me wrong—there are several good native clients out there, but I hadn’t found anything to be substantially better than Google’s web client. Caffeinated 1.2.2 (Mac App Store link) has changed all that.
On the surface, it’s simply beautiful. Its minimalist interface, laden with pleasant blues and grays, manages to be comprehensive without being overwhelming, despite my dozens of feeds and hundreds of unread items. In addition, Caffeinated includes an optional menu bar icon that shows the number of unread items in your feed, which is especially helpful when using the app in full-screen mode—it’s kept out of sight when you don’t want to be bombarded by your feed, but enables you to focus on it when you do.
