It’s been eight years since we reviewed the original version of Delicious Library, Delicious Monster's clever app for managing your media. But the question that greets Delicious Library 3, the latest edition in the franchise, is this: In 2013, is it still a good way to track and document all the items in your media collection?

The answer to that question: Mostly, but Delicious Library 3 has some mild shortcomings to be addressed.

If you’re not familiar with Delicious Library (the last major version of which, Delicious Library 2, was released five years ago), the Mac app organizes and tracks collections of books, movies, other media, and even tools—it’s media-oriented, but it’s not limited to media. Essentially, anything with a barcode can be scanned and added to the app’s customized “shelf.”

In the past, the easiest way to add an item to Delicious Library was by holding its barcode up to your computer’s webcam for scanning. The app uses this barcode to automatically find and enter pertinent information about the item (including a photo) to the shelves of your virtual library.

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There’s an endless array of minimalist, “distraction free” text editors to capture notes and ideas, but what about more visual, free-form thoughts? Fapptory’s $7 Delineato Pro (Mac App Store link) is a new diagramming and mind-mapping Mac app with a clean design and lack of visual clutter.

Each Delineato Pro document starts fresh with a gray canvas that is limitless in size. There are five other themes to choose from, but they’re mostly similar. To add to the canvas, either double or right-click to bring up a palette of shapes and lines, then drag the desired object onto the canvas. A grid can be enabled to help you align objects.

There are two simple ways to connect shapes. You can just drop a line out of the palette, then drag each end to connect it to a shape. Alternatively, click on a shape, then drag on one of the pop-up arrows to draw a line to another shape. If you just drag a line out of a shape and drop it on a blank spot in the canvas, it will create another shape of the same type.

There are a number of shapes to choose from, like clouds, but there are also purpose-specific shapes intended for Concepts, Tasks, Ideas, and Notes. You also have a selection of lines to choose from, including my favorite, a curved line that makes just about any diagram look elegant.

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Animated GIFs—we’ve all seen plenty of them. They’ve become the de facto standard for Internet memes and funny animations, but they’re also useful as alternatives to short video files—any modern browser (or in-app Web view) displays animated GIFs, so you don’t need to worry about which video formats a particular browser supports. In fact, some software vendors have taken to using animated GIFs instead of videos for short demos.

But how do you make good animated GIFs? The easiest method I’ve found is the $5 GIF Brewery (Mac App Store link). This nifty utility is simple to use, yet it offers a slew of useful features for creating your own animated images.

To create an animated GIF, first you open your source video in GIF Brewery. The app works with any video format supported by QuickTime on your particular Mac, which means it also works with formats supported by QuickTime plug-ins you’ve installed. GIF Brewery presents an editing window that looks much like what you’d see in any standard video-editing app. Buttons in the toolbar let you resize and crop the video to best fit the size you want for your final animated image.

If you don’t want to use the entire video in your animated GIF, you simply drag the playhead to where you want your animation to start, and then click Set Start. Drag the playhead to where you want the animation to end, and then click Set End. (The app offers many keyboard shortcuts for editing your clip.) You can preview the video at any time by clicking the Play button; however, oddly, instead of playing just your selection, GIF Brewery plays the entire video. In addition, according to the developer, OS X limits the in-app preview of your animated GIF to 10 frames per second. To view the GIF at full framerate, you need to export it (see below) and then open it in your browser.

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Back in the days of 56-kbps modems and 1.44MB floppies, compressing files was a necessity. These days, bandwidth and storage are less of a concern, but there are still reasons to package files into neat little bundles. A zip archive, for example, lets you attach a single “file” to an email message instead of tacking on multiple items. The zip file is smaller than the sum of those separate files—and it’s an industry standard that works across platforms.

OS X has long been able to uncompress zip files and some other archive types, using its built-in Archive Utility, but I’ve switched to The Unarchiver (Mac App Store link) because it supports more formats and offers easier customization options—and it’s just as free as Archive Utility.

When you launch The Unarchiver, its preferences window automatically opens to the Archive Formats tab. There you can see the software’s extensive format support, comprising 58 different file formats. Some, such as rar, are widely used, but you’ve probably never heard of some of the others—and are just as unlikely to encounter them.

This list is where you choose which formats you want The Unarchiver to handle. By default, zip and the other dozen or so other formats that OS X’s Archive Utility normally handles are unchecked, but by checking the box next to any of these, you can choose to have The Unarchiver deal with them instead. Handy 'Select All' and 'Deselect All' buttons let you make changes en masse.

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We all receive photos—scads of photos—via email, many of which we ignore because they’re not worth the bandwidth. But what if you want to show your kid that cute picture of a cat dressed up as a scuba diver—the one you got some past Halloween from who knows whom? As time passes, it’s harder to sort out, much less find and archive, such images. That’s where the appropriately titled Lost Photos (Mac App Store link) comes in.

A lightweight utility from Space Inch, Lost Photos (free; $3 to download unlimited photos) has a fresh, clean interface. The app connects to your IMAP email accounts using a secure connection and extracts all the photos from each account quickly and efficiently. Just type your email address and password into the Lost Photos window, and the app sifts through every message on the server, scraping up any photos it finds and placing them into a folder, named for that email account, on your drive for later viewing. (The app does not remove images from the mail server; it just finds and downloads them.)

The app provides some simple filters to help spare you the agony of viewing every company logo and headshot you receive: For example, the program can skip images under 8KB, as well as GIF files. (In my testing, it took about 25 minutes for the app to crawl through some 1300 email messages with these two options enabled.) You can also choose to ignore any images received before a particular date—so, for example, you can have Lost Photos search only messages received in the past two years.

Once Lost Photos finishes its search, the app offers buttons for adding all found images to iPhoto or showing your found photos in the Finder (where you can choose to manually import only some of them to iPhoto). You also get buttons for posting your found scuba-kitty image to Twitter or Facebook, emailing it to your friends, or posting it on Flickr.

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I’m a huge fan of Dropbox, the online service and app that together let you keep files synchronized between multiple computers, the Dropbox website, and even your iOS devices thanks to the Dropbox iOS app (and many third-party iOS apps that use Dropbox for storing files). Like many of my fellow Macworld editors, I keep all my in-progress work in my Dropbox folder so I can access that work from any device, anywhere, at any time.

But the one significant complaint I hear about Dropbox is that it syncs only the files and folders inside that special Dropbox folder. If you forget to put a particular document or folder inside the Dropbox folder, that data won’t be available on your other devices. I’ve admittedly fallen victim to this limitation myself, wanting to work on a file while away from my office, only to discover that I had apparently left that file on my desktop or in my Documents folder.

Which is why I’ve found Spotdox so useful. Also a combination of a Web service and a Mac app, Spotdox lets you remotely browse the files on your Mac and copy any of them—again, from afar—to your Dropbox folder to make them accessible.

The first time you launch the Spotdox app—you choose whether it lives in your menu bar or in the Dock—the app requests authorization to access your Dropbox account. Once you approve, you’ll see Spotdox’s Web interface; you can close this page, as it’s mainly for remote access (described below). Spotdox then sits in the background and waits for your remote requests.

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Those who’ve hooked up their MacBook to an external display are probably all too familiar with the dreaded dance of windows (not to be confused with George R.R. Martin’s bestselling A Dance with Dragons): You’ve got all your windows positioned exactly as you like them, then you disconnect your MacBook and blergh—windows every which way.

Sound familiar? Cordless Dog’s $15 Stay has the fix for what ails you. This menu-bar utility lets you save sets of window locations and sizes. So if you like your Twitter client pinned, just so, to the bottom-left corner of your screen, you can tell Stay to remember that window position—and here’s the key—both when you’re running your MacBook on its own and when it’s connected to your external display. If you want your IM client’s contact list to hug the right edge of the screen on your MacBook’s display but the left edge of your external display when it’s connected, Stay can do that too.

Better yet, you can have Stay automatically restore your windows whenever a display is connected and disconnected. So once you’ve chosen your favorite window positions, Stay does its thing transparently. (You can instead restrict Stay to being triggered manually, either using its systemwide menu or via a user-defined keyboard shortcut.) And if you’re particular about application window locations, you can choose to have Stay restore each app’s windows to particular sizes and locations whenever you launch that app.

Because Stay uses the names of windows to match them with the ones stored in your saved sets, the utility can have issues with windows whose titles change (for example, with text editors or Web browsers). You can fix that problem in one of two ways: by manually linking your current window to the one Stay has stored, using the Link Active Window To command in the app’s menu, or by setting up a window title pattern for Stay to look for.

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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.

Pupil functions like a lot of other similar utilities, but it also allows for customization of your list of screen resolutions. For example, if you have three different resolutions you like to use, you can choose to display only those three in Pupil’s menu—and put them in a preferred order. Other apps, such as QuickRes, display the whole list of available resolutions at all times—which I don’t mind, but it’s nice not to have to see options that you’ll never use. (Pupil’s settings screen claims that only the top six display modes will be available in the menu, but I was able to list more than six. The developer says that this incorrect text will be revised in an upcoming version of Pupil.)

On the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, Pupil provided me with access to 17 different screen resolutions, including 2880-by-1800 and 3840-by-2400. That’s a lot more than the five resolutions in OS X’s Displays pane, but far short of the 27 offered by QuickRes. More doesn’t necessarily mean better, though—chances are, the resolutions you need are in Pupil, and QuickRes offers resolutions you’ll likely never use. A representative for Pupil’s developer told me that the company decided to not show resolutions that don’t match the aspect ratio and color bit depth of the display.

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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.

When you activate Alfred using your chosen shortcut (I use Control+Space), you get a basic text-entry box. You start typing what you want there, and Alfred returns a list of possible hits. Scroll down that list (or use one of the displayed Command-number keyboard shortcuts) and select an item to open it. So far, this sounds just like Spotlight, right? But like other third-party launcher utilities, Alfred learns which apps you launch most frequently and puts the most-used ones at the top of the results list. (I wish it did so more reliably with files.)

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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.

Along the window’s left edge you find an iPhoto Libraries pane that includes any libraries you’ve added. (When you first launch the utility, your current iPhoto library appears here, and it will likely be the only library you initially see.) A Library pane to its right bears entries for recent images, events, albums, Facebook, Flickr, projects, and slideshows. You can instead select the Photos entry to view all the selected library’s images. Select an item in this pane and its contents appear in the large browser pane to the right. This browser lets you zoom in and out on images, much as you can in iPhoto.

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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.

In my first run, I was able to clear out 1.3GB of hard drive space, mostly by removing assorted language-support files I’ll never need and clearing application caches. (Note, however, that removing language-support files may cause problems with some applications—a few app updaters will refuse to update an application if the language-support files have been removed.) I had Disk Doctor leave my downloads and mail downloads alone.

For the Downloads, Mail Downloads, and Trash Can categories, you can preview the files to be deleted by clicking each category's View button. Before you delete that folder’s contents, you can move any important files you want to keep to another folder.

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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.

Which is why I’ve found the $5 Transloader (Mac App Store link) to be so useful. This app works with a free iOS app to let you download, on your Mac, files that you come across on your iPhone or iPad. Transloader is similar to the NoteTote app I reviewed last year, but whereas NoteTote requires you to edit a text file on your iOS device whenever you want to download a file to your Mac, Transloader offers a simple, easy-to-use app.

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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 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.

Programmers have always loved TextWrangler (and BBEdit) for ease-of-use features such as syntax coloring for various programming languages. New to this version are switchable syntax-coloring schemes. Code folding lets you view or hide the functions you’re working with, and TextWrangler gives you easy access to files on FTP and SFTP servers—you don’t even need to leave the program.

If you don’t know a syntax from a saxophone, you’ll still like TextWrangler’s many text-manipulation features, including case conversion, line wrapping and numbering, simple conversion of straight quotes to curly quotes (and vice versa), the ability to change quote levels in copied emails, and the ability to work with multiple files simultaneously. You can even insert the contents of another file into the one you’re editing. TextWrangler automatically saves your files as you’re working—if you quit the program with unsaved (or even never-saved) documents, they’re automatically restored when you next open the program.

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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.

(Why might you use an iPad or iPhone when you’re already sitting in front of your Mac? I sometimes use my iPad for Twitter or sending quick emails while I’m doing “real” work on my Mac, and I know more than a few people who perform particular tasks—sending SMS messages, adding notes to Evernote, typing entries in Day One, browsing Facebook, using Drafts—only on their iPhone or iPad. Maybe you’ve got a Yahoo Mail account and you prefer iOS Mail to Yahoo’s Web interface; similarly, as TidBits’s Adam Engst pointed out, there are some iPhone-only apps that you may want to use a real keyboard with.)

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There are plenty of characters and symbols your Mac can produce that you won’t find on your keyboard. Things such as ©, ¢, ™, and, yes, 😊. OS X offers a couple tools for finding these characters: The Keyboard Viewer shows you a graphical representation of your keyboard; press various combinations of modifier keys to see the characters and symbols you can type. (For example, it shows that you can type ™ by pressing Option+2.) The Character Viewer shows you all the symbols, special characters, and non-Roman characters you can use, separated into categories. You can browse characters or use the search box to find a particular item; double-clicking a character pastes it into the front-most text field.

But if you frequently type special characters, a more-convenient option is Characters (Mac App Store link). Whenever you need to “type” a special character, you just click Characters’s systemwide menu-bar icon or—my preferred method—press a keyboard shortcut.

The popover that appears shows a scrolling list of available special characters, divided into sections: Most Used (the ones you access most frequently, for quick access), Arrows, Block Elements, Bullets, Currencies, Cyrillic, Digits, Dingbats, Emoji, Geometric Shapes, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Latin Extended-A, Letter-Like, Math, Parentheses, Pictograms, Punctuation, and Symbols. You can disable, in Characters’s preferences, any categories you don’t use. However, you can’t reorder the sections—I’d like to put Punctuation near the top of the list and Emoji at the bottom. I also wish you could collapse less-frequently used sections without disabling them completely, so you didn’t have to scroll through them all the time. Thankfully, you can make the popover longer to show more characters at once.

If you know the name of the character you’re looking for, just start typing it in the search field; Characters filters the popover’s contents to show just those characters that match your search. For example, typing trade displays ™ and ®. (Tip: You can type the name of a category to show just that category.) One thing that would make this feature a bit more useful is if Character viewer would show the name of a character when you hover the pointer over it—knowing a character’s name would make for easier searching the next time you need that character.

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Have you ever wondered just how fast your home or work network really is? Or needed to troubleshoot a network connection? There are some solid command-line (Terminal) tools, such as iperf, that let you do this, as well as a number of traditional Mac apps. But Speedy Net (Mac App Store link), which I discovered last year via Twitter, is my current tool of choice. It’s a little app that does one thing, but does it well and simply: It lets you test the performance of a network connection between two Macs (or, using the $1 Speedy Net iOS app, between any combination of Macs and iOS devices).

Launch Speedy Net on two Macs on your network—it works only over a local network—and, assuming the Macs can see each other, each will show up in the Network Devices list on the other. On either end, select a connection to test, choose the amount of data to transfer (10GB, 1GB, 500MB, or 100MB), and click Start Test. You’ll see a progress bar as the data is transferred, along with live-updated data on network speed (in Mbps), latency (in ms), and time (in minutes and seconds). When the test finishes, you see the overall results.

Speedy Net can be useful for more than just satisfying your curiosity. Last year, I was experiencing very slow Internet and network performance on my office iMac; the other Macs in our home weren’t exhibiting the same problems. To eliminate my Internet connection as a culprit, I fired up Speedy Net and tested a local transfer between the iMac and the Mac mini in the family room. (Both Macs were connected to our home network using Ethernet.) The results were, frankly, horrible—the transfer speed, around 60 to 70 Mbps, was slower than it would have been on a bad Wi-Fi network.

I switched the iMac to Wi-Fi, keeping the Mac mini connected via Ethernet, and ran a Speedy Net test again, and the data-transfer speed was dramatically better. In other words, the problem was likely with Ethernet, and it was likely on the iMac’s end. I swapped Ethernet cables on the iMac and ran another test, but the new cable didn’t fix the problem. Next I switched the iMac to a different Ethernet port in my office; when I ran the Speedy Net test again, I got speeds of roughly 500 Mbps. It turns out my iMac’s normal Ethernet jack (the wall port, not the one on the iMac) had gone bad, and Speedy Net made it easy to find the problem.

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OS X Mountain Lion’s iOS-inspired Notification Center feature lets applications alert you to important events. But there’s more Notification Center could do—with the right apps. For example, if you’ve installed Growl and the excellent HardwareGrowler (Mac App Store link), you can get notifications for things such as peripheral connections and disconnections.

Notifi (Mac App Store link) looks to leverage Notification Center similarly. Like HardwareGrowler, Notifi is a small app that does nothing on its own; rather, it watches your Mac for particular events and then uses Notification Center to alert you to those events.

Using Notifi’s preferences window, you can choose which types of events you want notifications for. Enable the Devices Added/Removed option, and you’ll be notified whenever a volume is mounted or unmounted. (Unlike with HardwareGrowler, Notifi doesn’t watch for all peripheral connections and disconnections—just the mounting and unmounting of volumes.) When a volume is mounted, the notification you see includes information about the size of the drive and how much of that space is currently filled. When a drive is unmounted, you see when it’s safe to unplug.

The Disk Space settings let you set free-space thresholds for up to four volumes. When a particular volume’s free space dips below its threshold, Notifi notifies you. Unfortunately, Notifi is overzealous here: If you dismiss a low-drive-space warning, it quickly reappears. The only way to stop the warning from appearing is to free up some space on the drive (something you may not be able to do immediately) or disable the Disk Space option for that drive.

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The only clunky thing about Email Pro for Gmail 2.1 (Mac App Store only) is its name. This slender app provides a convenient way to get to your Gmail messages directly from your desktop.

Essentially a site-specific-browser, Email Pro leans on the mobile version of Gmail’s website for its main interface, though you have the option to use Gmail’s desktop layout instead. Though this Web-view approach can occasionally make retrieving mail slow, it also has several distinct advantages. Since you’re using Gmail directly, rather than importing its mail into an app, you don’t have to create an application-specific password, even if you’ve heightened your Gmail security settings. (Indeed, setting up Email Pro proved painless; after entering my Gmail username and password, I was off to the proverbial races.) And you can start working with your mail instantly, rather than waiting for a POP or IMAP client to download hundreds or thousands of messages.

You can use Email Pro either in a standard window, as a more-convenient popover (accessed by clicking a systemwide menu-bar item), or as an app that replaces your desktop background and sits behind your other open windows. While I preferred the discreet functionality of the popover, the desktop option may prove preferable if you can’t bear to be separated from your email for even an instant. It’s also an option that many of Email Pro’s rivals in the Gmail-front-end market lack.

Email Pro gets additional points for its friendly, colorful interface. While the icons that run down the left-hand toolbar may not be immediately comprehensible, the program includes explanatory help tags, which appear when you hover the pointer over interface elements, to quickly orient you. The search works just fine and dandy on both the desktop and popup mode.

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Between Google Hangout video conferences for work, Skype videos and calls for podcasts, and FaceTime chats with family and friends, I use AV-chat apps several times each week. But I’m not always an active audio participant: I’m a heavy user of the Mute button in every one of those apps and services. Sometimes it’s because I’m typing and I don’t want the clickety-clack of my keyboard to be audible on a podcast recording or to others in a meeting. Other times the maintenance folks are performing the day’s noisiest tasks at the same time as my chat, right outside my office window. And it’s not uncommon for family members to come into my home office while I’m chatting or recording.

The problem with using so many different apps for chats and recordings is that each of those apps has a different way to mute the microphone. Which isn’t a huge hassle, but it does mean that whenever I want to mute my mic, I need to stop and think about which app I’m using, and then remember where the mute control is. And if for some reason I use a different microphone-enabled app—for example, GarageBand for a podcast recording—I have to learn a new mic-mute control.

At least, that’s how it used to be. But I recently started using Shush ($3; Mac App Store link), and muting is now much simpler. When Shush is running, I can mute and unmute my mic using a systemwide hotkey—no matter which app or service I’m using, the mute action is the same. (Hotkey choices are currently limited to modifier keys. I’ve chosen Shift+Control, but I’d like to be able to assign any key combination.)

By default, Shush mutes your microphone unless you press and hold your hotkey(s). In other words, Shush gives you a push-to-talk microphone. But you can reverse this behavior so that your mic is generally live; you hold down your keyboard shortcut only when you want to mute. A useful option lets you quickly double-press your shortcut to toggle mute without having to hold down any keys—this is the way I end up using Shush most of the time.

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I’d never found an email client that might woo me away from Apple’s Mail () until I came across Arcode’s free Inky. This cleverly designed app seems built around the way most people use email every day.

On startup, Inky prompts you to set up an account for Arcode’s cloud-based service. You can then add details for any email accounts you own: IMAP, POP, or webmail. With only an email address and password for each, Inky set up two different email accounts in seconds. I appreciated how the program kept me informed as it figured out how to configure itself appropriately.

An email client that processes your mail through a third-party cloud service could understandably raise privacy concerns. The company takes pains, on its website, to dispel such worries. According to Arcode, Inky lets your computer connect to your email provider(s) and store messages—Inky doesn’t store or transmit your mail through the Arcode servers. It does hold your email accounts’ details and passwords, but they’re stored encrypted, with the only key being your Inky account password. Arcode says that as a result, none of its employees could ever gain access to your email.

On the plus side, Inky’s cloud-based approach offers considerable convenience. You can install Inky on as many different computers as you like, accessing multiple email accounts through a single convenient login. Inky even integrates seamlessly with OS X Mountain Lion’s Notifications Center feature to let you know when new mail arrives.

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Back in 2010, I reviewed version 3 of Smile’s TextExpander. The company recently updated its venerable text-expansion utility to version 4 ($35; $15 for owners of older versions), and though the latest version will be quite familiar to anyone who has used earlier iterations, Smile has added some notable new features.

For the uninitiated, TextExpander lets you create abbreviations for bits of text that you frequently type—the program calls these bits snippets. You type an abbreviation in any document or text field, and TextExpander instantly replaces the abbreviation with the corresponding snippet. For example, I’ve created simple snippets for my name (kmc), my address (ad1), and my telephone numbers (ttel and tmob). I also have a number of more-complex snippets that I use when writing in HTML that take advantage of special TextExpander features. For example, hrf types an <a href></a>-tagged link and inserts the contents of the clipboard as the URL.

The program also automates the tasks of filling out online forms, inserting email signatures, and even correcting typos (instantly replacing teh with the, for example). Suffice it to say that these snippets are so useful, and so ingrained in my workflow, that I could scarcely work without them.

You don’t need to remember all of your snippet abbreviations, as TextExpander’s systemwide menu provides quick access to your snippets. You just choose one from the menu to paste it immediately. This menu is especially useful for snippets for things such as HTML and CCS—TextExpander lets you create an entire library of snippets for this type of coding. Creating a snippet group within TextExpander puts that group in a separate submenu in the TextExpander menu for more-precise organization and easier access.

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It’s tough to beat old-fashioned arts and crafts: There’s something magical about being able to make something out of nothing more than paper, paste, and scissors. Except for the ensuing cleanup—seemingly endless and somehow futile—they’re still among the best activities for kids of all ages.

Still, these days kids sometimes want to set aside old-fashioned tools and explore their creativity using the family Mac. The results are often amazing and satisfying—and much easier to clean up.

Enter Aquafadas's $25 KidsMotion (Mac App Store link), an OS X app that helps kids use their photos, videos, and music to create high-quality slideshows with minimal effort. KidsMotion takes many cues from its more-advanced cousin, PulpMotion, but features a simpler interface that’s designed to minimize the frustration that goes into building a complex slideshow.

The app comes with a selection of fifty templates designed specifically for a young audience, with themes that range from sports to cartoons, from holiday cheer to artistic landscapes. Cute animations accompany the transitions between slides and photos. Thanks to the simplified design of the app, templates can be swapped in and out at any time, making the process fun and stress-free—something that, frankly, is not all that bad for adults, too.

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Longtime readers of the Mac Gems column know that I’m a keyboard person. With few exceptions, I prefer to keep my fingers on the keyboard and off my mouse, trackpad, or trackball—sticking to the keyboard is better ergonomically, and it’s often faster, as well.

But there’s one app where it’s been difficult for me to go keyboard-only: my Web browser. There’s no easy—or fast—way to use the keyboard to navigate websites, open links, and the like. OS X includes some special accessibility features that let you use the keyboard for these tasks, but those features were designed with accessibility, not productivity, in mind.

So I was happy to discover Vimari, an extension for Safari, based on the nifty Vimium extension for Chrome, that lets you open links and more using the keyboard. (Vimari is much more limited than Vimium, focusing on links; Vimium provides a slew of additional navigation shortcuts.)

Once you’ve installed the Vimari extension in Safari, pressing Vimari’s Link Hint shortcut (by default, Control+F) places a two-letter keyboard shortcut, highlighted in yellow, over every link on the current webpage. Shortcuts for links in particular areas of the screen tend to start with the same letter: For example, as you can see in the screenshot to the right, links in the navigation bar at the top of the webpage have shortcuts beginning with D; shortcuts for links in the middle of the page start with K.

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We’ve all experienced the embarrassment of sending someone an email referencing an attached file or document, only to receive a reply that, despite our claims, nothing was attached. It’s a frequent-enough problem that a few years back, Google added a feature to Gmail that would alert you if you forgot to attach a file referenced in your message.

Though OS X’s Mail app doesn’t include this convenient feature, ChungwaSoft’s $6 ForgetMeNot is a nifty mail plug-in that seamlessly adds it. Install ForgetMeNot, and whenever you attempt to send a message using Mail, the plug-in first scans the text of that email for specific words indicating that you meant to include an attachment. If ForgetMeNot detects one of those words and the message indeed includes an attachment, the message goes through; if the message is missing attachments, you see an alert. You can then choose to cancel sending, add the attachment, or send sans attachment.

ForgetMeNot includes default keywords for each of seven languages: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. For example, for English, the plug-in watches for the words attachment, attaching, attached, and attach. You can also add your own words to a language’s list—I’ve added image, images, file, and files to the English group—and you can disable languages you don’t use. However, you can’t add new languages: To add a list of keywords in a different language, you must add those words to one of the supported languages (which means ForgetMeNot will use that language’s stock keywords in addition to the keywords you add).

ForgetMeNot’s keyword-based intervention generally works well, although it’s of course limited by the list of words it watches for. If your message says “Check out this hilarious photo of Nancy!” and you haven’t added photo to the list of keywords, ForgetMeNot won’t alert you if you forget to include a hilarious photo of Nancy.

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I know more than a few people who connect an older Mac to their TV, using various audio and video cables, to play videos. Most of these people would love to instead stream those videos wirelessly to an Apple TV, but their Macs aren’t new enough to support Apple’s AirPlay technology and the AirPlay mirroring feature of Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). Sometimes they stream video using iTunes, but they also have video files in formats iTunes doesn’t support.

Unless Apple works some unexpected magic with OS X, older Macs will never get official AirPlay-mirroring capabilities. And I don’t expect iTunes to start supporting more video formats any time soon. But thanks to the $15 Beamer, AirPlay streaming is still possible. This simple app lets you stream videos from older (and newer) Macs to a 2nd- or 3rd-generation Apple TV. Specifically, Beamer works with 64-bit Intel Macs (any model from 2007 or later, along with some 2006 Macs) running OS X 10.6 or later.

Launch Beamer, and its window shows all compatible Apple TVs on your local network. Choose one, and Beamer instructs you to drop a movie file into the Beamer window; a few seconds later, the movie starts playing on the chosen Apple TV. (One feature I’d like to see is queued playback, so I could drop a group of videos onto Beamer and have them play back in order.)

Beamer streams the video to your Apple TV just as if you’d streamed it from iTunes: full-screen, with a progress bar whenever you pause playback or use the forward or rewind controls. In fact, you can use your Apple TV’s remote to control playback—you don’t need to do so from your Mac. If your video file includes subtitles (or is paired with a subtitles file) in MicroDVD, SSA/ASS, SubRip (SRT), or SubViewer formats, Beamer can display those subtitles during playback, although you can’t adjust the size or font.

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For Macworld editors, the end of the calendar year means more than just holiday vacations and the passing of yet another end-of-the-world prediction. It’s also the season of awards. Over the past couple weeks, we’ve given you our 2012 Editors’ Choice Awards for the best Mac products of the year and our 2012 App Gems Awards for the best iOS apps of the year. Here at Mac Gems HQ, we have no official awards with fancy trophies, but I look back and pick my favorite Mac Gems of the previous 12 months—the best inexpensive-but-good apps we covered over the just-completed year.

Unlike the Eddies and the App Gems Awards, the “Mac Gems of the Year,” if you will, aren’t chosen by committee. Rather, I hand-pick them from among the over 100 Gems we mined at Macworld during 2012. (To qualify for Mac Gems, a product must be priced at $35 or less and must earn a 3.5-mouse rating or higher.) The ones recognized here aren’t necessarily the Mac Gems that earned the highest ratings from our reviewers. Instead, they’re the apps that I felt did something innovative; offered exceptional value; improved productivity above and beyond other apps; or ended up being used—by me or a fellow Macworld editor—over and over. These inexpensive applications and add-ons will help you get the most out of your Mac without blowing your budget.

Eddy-winning Gem

It’s not uncommon for a standout Gem to receive an Editors’ Choice (Eddy) Award from the Macworld editorial staff, as well. This year, there was one such Gem:

Tweetbot for Mac (; $20; website): As my colleague Lex Friedman put it: “You can find numerous great Twitter apps for the Mac, but Tweetbot earns this Eddy because of its cleverly implemented approach to bringing an iOS app to the Mac. The app will feel familiar to anyone who has used its iOS counterparts, but it still embraces the fact that it is running on [OS X] instead.”

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If you work with video, chances are you occasionally need to convert video files from one format to another. For instance, if you’ve downloaded videos from YouTube or other online video services, that content may be in Flash or Windows Media formats, which aren’t viewable on any iOS device. Or if you update web content, you may have a number of movies in H.264 format that simply won’t play in Google’s Chrome browser, which doesn’t support H.264.

There are many tools available for converting video between formats, but the one I often turn to is the free Miro Video Converter (). While its interface isn’t what you would call Mac-standard, the program does a great job converting videos. It supports a huge number of video formats, including some oddball ones, and it can output video optimized for iOS devices, as well as for a slew of Android devices including the Kindle Fire.

When you launch Miro Video Converter, you’re greeted with a large, dark, and basically empty interface. However, it’s pretty obvious what needs to be done, thanks to explanatory text that states, “Drag videos here or Choose Files.” To convert one or more video files, drag them into the window, or click the Choose Files link to use a standard OS X file-navigation dialog box to select them.

Once you’re added at least one video, the buttons at the bottom of the interface become active. Choose your output format by clicking one of these buttons (Apple, Android, Other, or Format) and choosing from the options in the resulting pop-up menu. Miro Video Converter automatically selects the resulting video’s size, quality, and codec settings based on the chosen platform or device.

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One of my all-time favorite Mac utilities was MaxMenus, a System Preferences pane that let you create multiple custom menus, each containing your choice of apps, files, folders, volumes, and other frequently accessed items. Unfortunately, MaxMenus appears to have been abandoned—you can no longer download it, its website is dead, and while it currently works under Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8.2), I suspect some future update to OS X will render MaxMenus useless.

I’ve tried—and quickly discarded—a number of alternatives, but one that works well is PointWorks’s $2 CustomMenu (Mac App Store link). Launch CustomMenu, and its systemwide menu icon appears on the right-hand side of your menu bar. Click this icon and choose Customize Menu, and you can choose the items you want to appear in the menu.

Click the Add (+) button next to Group on the left to create a new group—a section of the menu that’s separated from other sections by a divider line. I don’t know if there’s a limit to the number of groups, but I had ten groups in my menu while testing CustomMenu, and the utility still let me add another. These group names and dividers take up space—and you can’t add items to the menu without using groups—but they make the menu much easier to navigate than if all your items were in a single, uninterrupted list.

Select any group, and you can add items to that group by either dragging apps, files, and folders from the Finder into the group’s item list, or clicking the plus-sign (+) button next to Items to use OS X’s standard file-navigation dialog box. You can also move an item between groups by dragging it. Select an item and click the minus-sign (-) button, or press the Delete key, to remove the item from the list.

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Our Macs can be chatty even when we wish they weren’t. Apps, and even the OS itself, regularly reach out to the rest of your local network and to the Internet to probe, query, and blab. Little Snitch 3 intercepts these requests and presents them to you for inspection and approval. The latest update to the software adds inbound-connection management, too. Little Snitch has graduated from being a sort of outbound-only firewall with notifications to being a full-fledged firewall product with a friendly interface that informs you about any network-related activities.

OS X’s built-in firewall, when enabled, functions based on services and applications, allowing only inbound connections aimed at particular pieces of software—for example, a connection to iPhoto’s shared-library service. But the OS X firewall can’t be configured to allow a connection from a particular Internet protocol (IP) address. Little Snitch offers this type of functionality, but it reveals this power in stages, allowing a simple approach for those who want security without fuss, while using configurable rules to provide levels of deeper and deeper access for those who want more-precise control.

As in previous versions, Little Snitch’s most obvious use is in alerting you to the network activity of applications and low-level software. For instance, launch Google Chrome, and Little Snitch warns you that the browser is attempting to connect to www.google.com (to check for updates, ostensibly). Should Little Snitch let it proceed, and, if so, for how long and with what limits? The utility even differentiates between IP addresses and ports. (An IP address is a destination, like an apartment building; a port is like a specific apartment within the building.)

Little Snitch comes configured to allow common activities—for example, Safari requesting data from port 80 (standard Web pages) and port 443 (https-secured pages)—to pass through without notice. Many OS X system daemons, autonomous bits of low-level software, also get preapproved. But even these passes are explicitly allowed via rules that you can view, with descriptions, in the Little Snitch Configuration app.

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With Thanksgiving upon us, it’s time for the annual avalanche of Black Friday sales—and Pre-Black Friday sales, and Cyber Monday sales, and Weekend-Before-Cyber Monday sales, and…you know the drill. But most of those sales, whether online or in physical stores, focus on hardware and gear. If you’re looking for some great Mac software, either for yourself or for your favorite gift recipient, there are currently two big Mac-software bundles, each offering a bevy of apps for one reasonable price. Even if you just wanted the Mac Gems each bundle contains, both are bargains, but each also includes a bunch of other good software that sweetens the pot considerably. (All apps included in these bundles are full versions.)

Productive Macs Bundle

The Productive Macs bundle (available until November 30) includes nine apps for a total of $30, compared to $239 if purchased separately at regular prices:

TextExpander (Mac Gems review; normally $35): Text Expander is my favorite text-expansion utility—I type a few characters, and the utility expands that abbreviation into a longer snippet of frequently typed text. TextExpander has, according to its built-in tracking feature, typed over 300,000 characters for me in just the past six months.

Path Finder (Mac Gems review; normally $40): A powerful replacement for the Finder, Path Finder includes a dual-pane file browser, a drop stack for temporary file/folder storage, window tabs, folder bookmarks, a built-in Terminal-style shell, a file-transfer queue, file tagging, batch renaming, and hex and ACL editors. And those are just the features the developer notes in its one-sentence summary—Path Finder includes many more “I wish the Finder did this” options.

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