Latest Posts in Mac Gems

AppleJack 1.5

As someone who’s written books and many articles on Mac troubleshooting, one of my favorite utilities has long been The Apotek’s AppleJack, a clever utility that lets you perform a number of troubleshooting procedures at startup—without requiring a Mac OS X or third-party CD or DVD. Unfortunately, Leopard rendered the previous version of AppleJack inoperable, so I’ve done without for nearly a year.

With the recent release of AppleJack 1.5 , you can now install and use the utility on Macs running Leopard (OS X 10.5), so today’s as good a time as any to revisit this essential troubleshooting tool.

Installing AppleJack requires an admin-level user account, as it modifies OS X’s startup process and makes a minor (and safe) tweak to the root account. Once installed, AppleJack is available in OS X’s single-user mode, accessed by holding down Command+S at startup. Just below the standard “If you want to make modifications to files” message, you see a new message instructing you to type applejack for troubleshooting assistance. Doing so brings up a textual menu of options, shown below; you simply type the desired number or letter and press return to perform that task.

Promising Prospect: FlexCal 1.0

Many Mac users take advantage of Mac OS X’s iCal program for keeping calendars and tracking tasks. But a common request I hear is for a way to add new events and to-dos without having to actually launch iCal.

One solution is Flexgames’ FlexCal 1.0. Once installed, you simply press your FlexCal keyboard shortcut—which you choose in a new FlexCal pane in System Preferences—to bring up a small, floating window for entering a new task; press the shortcut again to switch to a new-event window.

Timeline 2.1.3

If you ever have the need to make a visual timeline—for a presentation, as a teaching aid, or for use in a home movie—you’ll want to check out Bee Documents’ Timeline. This unique program makes it a snap to create an attractive timeline: First you choose from among seven templates, and then you choose the source for your timeline’s events. Clicking on Create Timeline lets you choose several options about your chosen data source, and then your timeline is created. Timeline automatically chooses the “best” layout for your events.

Supported data sources include your Address Book (for a timeline of birthdays), iCal (for calendar events), iPhoto or Aperture (for a timeline of photos based on date), iTunes (to view songs or albums by the last date played), and RSS feeds (for a timeline of articles by date). Another nifty option is System Profiler, which creates a timeline showing the dates and times you installed every Apple software update in a given time span. You can instead choose a blank timeline for adding events manually. (I had some problems with the iPhoto option, which sometimes didn’t find any photos in the selected date range.)

One you’ve created a timeline, you can customize it by choosing different fonts, colors, background images, and more. And, of course, you can easily add and delete events. Each event can have a title, date and time (or a date range), notes, a URL (a link to a Web page or a local file), and an image. A built-in photo browser makes it easy to add photos from your iPhoto library, or you can simply drag an image into an event; Timeline automatically scales the image to fit the timeline, or you can resize each image manually.

AudialHub 1.07

Editor’s note: As we noted last week, our Summer of Mac Gems has officially ended. We’re now back to our usual two-Gems-a-week schedule

You can use iTunes to convert audio files from one format to another, but it's a bit of a hassle and the number of supported formats—for both input files and output—is limited. Ah, if only there was an audio version of the excellent VisualHub () video-conversion software, right? As it turns out, the folks who brought us VisualHub, Techspansion, have applied their considerable talents to the field of audio. The result is AudialHub, a similarly-easy utility for converting audio files.

To convert files using AudialHub, you just drag the files into the program’s window, choose the output format, and click on Start. Over 20 input formats are supported, and output formats include AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, WMA, and 3G. (A unique feature is that AudialHub can also extract and convert the audio track[s] of many video files.) For lossy output formats, you can choose the audio quality of the resulting file; a useful Preview palette lets you hear, in real time, how your settings affect the resulting audio quality. The conversion process is surprisingly fast, and if you’ve got a multi-core Mac, AudialHub can process multiple files simultaneously.

Wrapping up the Summer of Mac Gems ’08

With our review of Simple Comic 1.6.1, our Summer of Mac Gems series ends. It started back in June with a review of Lingon and ended 42 programs later. If you're interested in the other programs reviewed during the Summer of Mac Gems, check out our Mac Gems homepage. You can also see a complete listing of these Gems in the September 2008 issue of Macworld.

Our regular, twice-a-week Mac Gems column will resume next week. Until then, here are three programs you can try for yourself. They're what we call Promising Prospects, software that's not yet final, but available to the general public. Since they're not finalized, use them at your own risk—and be sure to give the developer feedback if you do encounter a bug.

ChocoFlop This image editor uses Apple's CoreImage to display graphics on your screen; the graphic speed will depend on your Mac's graphics card. You can see previews of your changes and filters in real-time.

Simple Comic 1.6.1

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

I’m a fan of Bitcartel’s ComicBookLover (), which provides an iTunes library-style approach to your digital comics collection. But sometimes all you want to do is read a comic book. And that's the beauty of Simple Comic , which does pretty much what the name says: gives you a fast, simple interface for reading comic books saved in PDF, CBR, and CBZ formats.

SimpleComic.

Even better, it comes with a Quick Look plug-in, so Leopard users can get quick access to comics right from the Finder. Now if only the major comic companies would get with the program and offer more comics in downloadable form.

Black Ink 1.1.2

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

If you’re a fan of crossword puzzles, like I am, then you should definitely consider adding Red Sweater Software’s Black Ink to your software arsenal.

The Mac-only program lets you solve crossword puzzles on your computer and allows you to check your answers at any time (as long as the puzzle has an unlocked answer key).

TypeCast 1.0b

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

iTunes' podcast support is great. The program always remembers where you pause podcast installments, and iPhone users can sync podcasts on a computer other than the one they use for music and video syncing.

So what if you've got a file you wish were in a podcast—say, an interview downloaded from the Web—but isn't? Red Sweater Software’s TypeCast solves this problem by creating a phony podcast in iTunes and filling it with whatever files you drag into its window.

TubeTV 1.0

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.

Sure, the iPhone and the Apple TV provide access to YouTube videos, but this access is not the same as downloading a YouTube video to your hard drive. For that, you can use TubeTV 1.0, a straightforward, basic YouTube video downloader.

Just enter the URL of the YouTube video into TubeTV (or use the Search field) and click on the "Download movie" button, and TubeTV saves the video to your Mac.

PodWorks 2.9.3

As much as we love our Macs, they’re occasionally imperfect devices—they can crash, and if we, in our particularly imperfect way, neglect to back up our data, that data may then be vaporized. Data loss is particularly painful when that data is your iTunes library.

Thankfully, a copy of that library can often be found in your pocket, housed within your iPod or iPhone. PodWorks’ job is to copy it from your pocket to the inside of your now trouble-free Mac.

PodWorks 2.9.3.

Like other utilities, it copies all your media from your iPod via the iPod’s data cable. Unlike some other utilities, it also copies your playlists, ratings, and play counts. Plus, it works with the iPhone and iPod touch and can run directly from a click-wheel iPod