Four years ago, we reviewed Mailplane 2, the first dedicated Gmail client that avoided traditional IMAP and POP approaches to Gmail, opting instead for standard browser technology under the hood. The result was an app that gave you the benefits of “real” Gmail with the advantages of a native Mac app.

Like that version, Mailplane 3 beautifully transforms Google’s webmail service into a full-fledged desktop app, with an impressive interface and well-thought-out features. But it’s not the only game in town these days—and many traditional email clients now handle Gmail better—so whether you’re willing to spend $25 for slightly more functionality than what is already offered through your Web browser may depend on just how much you love Gmail.

I briefly used Mailplane 2.5 a few months back, and Mailplane 3 represents a huge, applause-worthy improvement. Not only does it work flawlessly with Gmail’s recent interface updates, but it’s also considerably more polished in its look and feel than previous Mailplane versions. Big, friendly icons highlight the program’s sleek, silver look, and Mailplane 3 boasts numerous improvements beyond its surface appeal.

Like its predecessor, Mailplane ties Gmail neatly into the rest of the Mac OS. You can import up to ten different accounts, use Mac-friendly keyboard shortcuts, and add recipients to a new message by picking from your contacts.

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Literature and Latte's $15 Scapple is a unique amalgamation of productivity tools from the folks who brought us the amazing Scrivener () writing app. The developers describe Scapple as a freeform, nonlinear, mind-mapping text editor—unlike most mind-mapping software, there’s no suggested hierarchy and no set system for capturing ideas.

The app starts you off with a blank canvas. Double-click anywhere to add a new note. To connect notes, just drag and drop one onto the other. If you change your mind, you can repeat that process to disconnect the two notes. The default connection is a simple dotted line, but if you’d rather have a directional arrow, hold down the Option key as you drag and drop. If you’d rather the arrow point the other way, instead hold Command+Option. If you prefer an arrow that points both ways, hold down Shift+Command.

In addition to connecting notes, a feature typical of mind-mapping software, you can also stack notes to form lists. After typing a note, press Shift+Return to create a new note stacked underneath. To stack existing notes, you just drag to select them, and then either choose Notes -> Stack, or press Command+’ (apostrophe). You use the same procedure for adding a note to an existing stack: Just select the stack and the note and then use the Stack command.

Oddly, you also use this procedure to reorder a stack: First you select the note just above the place in the stack you want the moved note to go, then you select the note you want to move, and then you use the Stack command. I find this process to be annoying, as I’d much rather simply drag and drop notes to rearrange them.

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Many Mac users whose relationship with the Mac predates Mac OS X retain an affection for macro utilities—applications that let you string together a series of actions, and summon those macros with a click or a key press to automate repetitive tasks. Chief among them was QuicKeys, an application passed from company to company before finally coming to rest (and currently in deep hibernation) with Startly Technologies.

With the decline of QuicKeys and the arrival of new users who are generally unaware of utilities of its ilk, macro utilities seem to have dropped off the radar during the past few years. And that’s regrettable, particularly when one as useful, powerful, and affordable as Keyboard Maestro 6 ($36; $18 for upgrades) exists.

Working with the Maestro

When I reviewed Keyboard Maestro 4.2 in 2010, I covered the utility’s workflow, which hasn’t changed significantly (though its system requirements have—version 6 requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion). Feel free to check that review for all the details, but here’s the gist: The macro editor is laid out in three columns. The first includes any macro groups you’ve created. as well the All Macros group. The second column displays all macros in the selected group (both those included with Keyboard Maestro and those you’ve made). The third column details the actions included in the selected macro.

When you create a new macro, the third column becomes the editing area where you add actions and configure triggers (the things you must do to execute the macro—type a keyboard shortcut, type a string of characters, or launch an application, for instance). When adding an action, you’ll notice that the first two columns change: The first shows categories of actions, and the second offers actions associated with the selected category. To create a macro, you just drag actions from the second column to the third, in the order in which you want them to execute.

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It pays to know what’s going on inside your Mac, whether you’re watching your free memory or monitoring hardware. To that end, almost no piece of software does what Bjango’s $16 iStat Menus 4.05 achieves, offering full monitoring of your system’s CPU, RAM, and disk usage; network activity; component temperatures; fan speeds; Bluetooth functionality; and international dates and times. If you crave useful, at-a-glance information about your Mac’s components, iStat Menus puts that data right in your menu bar.

Over the years, iStat Menus has had a few radical transformations, growing beyond its origins as a freeware System Preferences pane to become a full-fledged application—but it has grown up gracefully. You can customize the application, which now resides in your menu bar, to display information about the specific components you’d like to watch. On my 2011 13-inch MacBook Pro, I prefer to display the Battery, Network, Hard Drive, RAM, and CPU modules on display. Dragging the desired components into place is easy enough.

iStat Menus offers generous portions of valuable technical information in a readily digestible format. A quick click on the Temperature-sensor module, for instance, reveals the temperatures for each element of your computer, down to components such as the CPU cores, your MacBook’s palm rest and battery, and so on. The utility can display historical data as a chart that allows you to see exactly how each component in your Mac has performed over time. This feature is handy for diagnosing components that may be failing, and outside of a few programs—including the tools generally leased to Apple Certified Macintosh Technicians—it’s rare to find a program that offers readouts for specific modules, sensors, and system components.

Other features, such as a battery-cycle counter and -condition readout, help answer pertinent questions, such as whether your battery is in good shape and when you might need to fork out some dough to Apple for a replacement. Shortcuts for Apple’s Activity Monitor, Console, Terminal, System Profiler, and System Preferences give you easy access, so you don’t have to wade through the /Applications/Utilities folder to get to the app you want.

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App.net (ADN) is a relatively new online service that many people think of as just an alternative to Twitter: a place to post short messages and to read the messages of people you follow. But App.net also offers a number of other services, including group chat rooms and—my favorite—a place to store and share files.

Specifically, every paid App.net account starts out with 10GB of space, with a file-size limit of 100MB, while free accounts get 500MB of storage with a file-size limit of 10MB. Paid members can increase their total storage through new-member referrals. (Speaking of which, if you’re not using App.net yet, and you’d like to give it a try, you can get a free account using this link.)

App.net’s file storage is designed to be app-neutral—you can access and manage your storage from any app or service that uses the App.net File API, including Web apps and any App.net clients that support the feature. The most common use of this storage, so far, is for sharing files—photos, videos, PDFs, you name it—with other people. Many ADN clients include features for uploading files and then linking to them from within messages posted to the service, but you can use your ADN storage to share files anywhere: email, IM, and even on other social-media services such as Facebook or Twitter.

The easiest way to do this is by using a dedicated Mac app. I’ve tried several, and my current favorite is Orangutango’s $8 Swing 1.0.2 (Mac App Store link). If you’ve got a file you want to share, you just drag and drop it onto Swing’s systemwide menu icon. The menubar icon fades in and out during the upload. When the upload finishes, you hear a confirmation sound and see a Notification Center alert. Even better, the direct URL to that upload, for sharing the file with other people, is copied to the clipboard for pasting elsewhere.

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Writing a script is fun. Formatting a script? Less so. Many an idea can be paused or squashed entirely when you’re focused on making sure your character headers are properly centered. Film industry favorite Final Draft attempts to automate many of these hassles, but the program is still somewhat chaotic for those looking to simply write.

Enter the $20 Highland (Mac App Store link), which uses the Markdown-inspired Fountain syntax to offer screenwriters a simpler, cleaner place to bring their characters to life.

Highland’s big appeal comes not just from its minimalist writing interface, but its conversion capabilities. The app can import a text-based PDF or FDX (Final Draft) file and translate it into editable Fountain text without losing your initial formatting. You can likewise export a Fountain file to a PDF or FDX file once you’re ready for an inital reading or more-advanced formatting.

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Jörg Jacobsen’s $5 Eye-Friendly (Mac App Store link) is the third resolution-switching utility for the Retina MacBook Pro that I’ve looked at, after Pupil () and QuickRes (). In my quest to find the ideal resolution-switching app for my Retina MacBook Pro, is the third app the charm?

Like the other two apps, Eye-Friendly appears only in the menu bar. When you want to change your display’s resolution, you click the Eye-Friendly icon and mouse over your display (the menu lists your laptop’s built-in display, as well as any external displays); a submenu appears with available resolutions. Resolutions that look the best on that display are denoted with an Eye-Friendly icon; choose the desired resolution to switch to it. If you use only the best-looking resolutions, the Eye-Friendly Modes Only option configures the app to show only those resolutions.

Eye-Friendly’s menu is much more elegant that QuickRes’s, though it’s not as flexible as Pupil’s, which allows you to not only select which specific resolutions you want to appear in the menu, but also re-label them. But since it’s not difficult to find a resolution in Eye-Friendly’s list—and, as I mentioned, you can narrow the list down to show only the best resolutions—this level of customization isn’t a feature I miss.

Eye-Friendly also offers convenient keyboard shortcuts: Just place your cursor on the display you want to change, and then press Control+Option+Command+Up Arrow to cycle up through available resolutions or +Down Arrow to cycle down. Eye-Friendly displays each resolution in a semi-transparent overlay on the screen; when you settle for a couple seconds on the one you want, the display’s resolution changes to match.

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While I often set timers with Siri on my iPhone, doing so means I need another Siri command or series of swipes and taps to check the timer’s progress. When I’m at my desk working, I prefer a simple onscreen timer. Whimsicalifornia's $3 Timebar (Mac App Store link) is a nifty timer app that lives in your menu bar. Actually, lives isn’t quite the right word: Timebar consumes your menu bar—but in a good way.

To use Timebar, you simply click the Timebar icon in your menu bar (it’s the one that looks like a stopwatch, which makes it easy to confuse with the Time Machine icon), and then you drag a slider to set the length of your timer. Click Start, and the background of your Mac’s menu bar turns blue, fading from right to left until the timer hits zero—much like any standard progress bar. When the timer runs out, you’re alerted with a dialog box and, optionally, a sound.

The aforementioned slider is an unusual design choice: You can set a timer for one minute, two minutes, and then in five-minute increments up to four hours, and then in 30-minute increments up to eight hours. I understand the thinking behind this approach, but it limits your flexibility when it comes to choosing a timer length. For example, I brew my tea for four minutes, and I put some foods in the microwave for seven. I’d like to at least have the option to enter the timer duration manually.

That said, you can download a pair of Timebar extras for setting timers of any length using Alfred or Terminal. And the app is scriptable with a custom URL protocol (timebar://), which means you can create your own means to control it—for example, by using LaunchBar.

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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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