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.
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.
Typingstats (Mac App Store link) is a utility that tracks your typing habits. It sits in your Mac’s menu bar and tracks everything you type whenever the utility is open. The results it generates offer everything from your average words-per-minute, to the key or keys most likely to break due to frequent use. Typingstats is available for $1 on the Mac App Store.
As a typing utility, Typingstats gives users control over what exactly they can track, though words per minute and keystrokes (including invisible characters) are the default settings.
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’re like many Mac users, your Downloads folder looks like that closet you never go into: all sorts of things piled up, unorganized—some of which may have been there for years. In addition, you may have folders inside your Downloads folder, and you may have forgotten what’s in them.
Downloads(Mac App Store link)—the app—gives you a different way of accessing this folder. When you launch the app, you’ll see all the items in your Downloads folder, whether they are at the top level, or buried deep inside folders. The app’s window displays these items both in a list (at the top of the window) and as icons (at the bottom).
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.
There’s nothing worse than seeing that dialog box pop up, warning you that your MacBook’s battery is about to take a trip down the river Styx. While OS X does a decent job of telling you to plug in your computer before the black screen descends, it doesn’t allow a lot of flexibility in how it provides you with alerts. That’s where Low Battery Saver (Mac App Store link) comes in.
The app’s purpose in life is solitary: It warns you when your battery hits a certain amount of time remaining, and then shuts down your computer. Choose Preferences from the menu bar icon (which is the only way to access the app) and you can configure at what point the program’s Safe Sleep feature will turn off the screen, hard drive, and network. That, hopefully, will prevent your MacBook from going into hibernation, after which the computer usually takes a long time to wake up again. It should also give you plenty of time to finish up what you were doing and save your work.
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.
ChronoSlider (Mac App Store link) receives its name from its simple—yet effective—input method: you set alarms and reminders by sliding your cursor across your Mac’s screen. This allows for lightning fast input and less of an interruption to your workflow.
In ChronoSlider, each alarm or reminder is called a “slide.” Setting a new reminder is a two-step process: first, set the time, and then name the alarm. ChronoSlider uses large text banners across your screen as alarm notifications. By default, these alarms are not audible, and the text banners only go away when you click them.
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.
You’d be hard-pressed to prove that you absolutely needLooky 1.0.0(Mac App Store link). In truth, Looky, a menu-bar utility for quickly popping open a live view from your Mac’s built-in camera, is at best a nicety, and at worst a bit superfluous. But it turns out that the utility can prove useful at times.
Click on the eyeball icon in your menu bar, and the Looky window appears, showing your smiling face along with whatever’s behind you. The window loads quickly enough, though it generally takes an extra moment or two for the Mac’s iSight or FaceTime camera to turn on and the video to appear. Still, the process is notably quicker than launching a built-in app like Photo Booth.
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.
Speed Download is a download and FTP manager with features for both basic and more advanced needs. The result is a useful app, which integrates well into Safari and iTunes, and can greatly boost your workflow.
In a sense, Speed Download is really two applications in one: a simple download manager and a more complex download and FTP manager. The app allows you to switch between the two, but—for the uninitiated—the simple download option is more than enough to meet basic needs.
