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.
Digital asset management can be a real hassle, particularly if you have thousands of image, audio, and video files that you need to find and use as a part of your day-to-day business. Minder Softworks’ Stock Keeper (Mac App Store link) offers a way to easily track and manage your digital assets without spending a fortune.
Stock Keeper uses tags, license, payment, date, notes and other information to help you organize your files. Customized Smart Folders that, like their eponym in the Finder, automatically collect images and other media as you add them to your Stock Keeper library based on criteria you define, which make it easy to quickly locate your 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.
I confess: I like to whistle while I work. Well, not so much “whistle” as “listen to music.” Usually I turn to my tried-and-true iTunes library, but lately I’ve been trying out Streambox 4.2(Mac App Store link), a full-featured Mac client for the Pandora streaming audio service.
Of course, the app gives you access to several of Pandora’s features, such as the ability to give a song a thumbs up or thumbs down, skip forward and backward (up to Pandora’s own limits), view a list of song attributes, and create stations based on a song or artist.
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.
It’s been at least a year since I’ve received an email with a winmail.dat file as an attachment. Winmail.dat and MSG files are created when someone using Microsoft Outlook adds special formatting, such as bolded text or fancy fonts, to an email message. Outlook, assuming that everyone knows how to read its special formatting, puts it all into a tidy little package that Apple’s Mail app (and many other email applications) can’t read. Klammer (Mac App Store link) helps you unpackage those files so you can get to the important content that is wrapped up inside them.
Klammer is a bit of a one trick pony, but it’s a pretty good trick. When you come across one of these files, you can open it in and use Klammer to read what’s in the file. The application also offers you the option of exporting the file in a format that can be read and imported by most email applications. An optional $10 in-app purchase takes batches of these files and, instead of converting them one at a time, allows you to convert them all in one shot.
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.
Install MailTags 3 and you’ll soon forget it’s there. Sure, it adds a superb level of functionality to Apple’s native Mail that you won’t be able to live without once you’ve tried it, but it is so fully and beautifully integrated into the Mail app at so many levels that you’ll forget where Mail ends and MailTags begins.
Basic tagging means assigning keywords to items so you can search for them later. MailTags goes far beyond that, letting you create and assign project names, colors, priorities, and even lengthy notes to any piece of Mail. A message can inherit tags from one earlier in its thread, and you can send tags along with messages to colleagues who also use MailTags.
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.
Clusters 1.5.6 is a file-compression app unlike any I’ve seen before. You tell it which folders you’d like it to compress, and it does so silently in the background. When it finishes, you should notice no difference at all—except that your total amount of free disk space is higher. Files automatically decompress as you open them.
Compressed files look and work exactly like their uncompressed versions, and can even be seen in their original size if viewed in Finder. (The Clusters preference pane shows you how much space you’ve saved.) Because Clusters relies on a low-level compression capability built into Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and later, you can even copy your files to computers without Clusters installed, or attach them to email messages, and they’ll be decompressed on the fly.
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.
Let’s say you find an address online that you know you’ll need to access later. You can jot down the address on a piece of paper, manually add it to your Address Book, or email it to yourself for later reference. FormalAddress (Mac App Store link) adds another option, which saves time and is incredibly convenient: it ports addresses from the web (and other sources) to your Address Book in seconds.
When you come across an address that you want to import to your Address Book, just copy the text to your clipboard, open FormalAddress and paste the address in the blank box on the left. Click the “formalize” button at the center of the screen and FormalAddress arranges the address, as it deems necessary. This process works well, although I did encounter some trouble with the formatting of apartment numbers in testing.
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.
The app is simply designed by the team at Quote-Unquote Apps, opening with a single dialog that asks you to drag and drop an image or PDF for watermarking. Once you do so, a two-pane window opens with a preview of the file on the left and controls for watermarking on the right.
