Latest Posts in Mac Gems

SneakPeek Pro enhances previews of graphics and publishing files

Back in September, I reviewed SneakPeek Photo, a nifty plug-in that enhances Quick Look previews of image files, providing lots of useful information about images without requiring you to open those images in a separate program. (If you’ve never used Quick Look, just select a file in the Finder and press the Space bar; for many types of files, you’ll get a large preview.)

The developers of SneakPeek Photo offer another Quick Look plug-in, SneakPeek Pro, that may prove even more useful if you spend much of your time working with graphics and publishing files. SneakPeek Pro adds Quick Look support for Adobe Illustrator and InDesign documents and templates, Adobe Swatch Exchange documents, Adobe InDesign XML Interchange files, Freehand MX documents, and Encapsulated Postscript (EPS) files. Once the plug-in is installed, using Quick Look on any of these file types will show you a large preview of the file. (This works even if you’ve opted not to save your Illustrator documents with PDF compatibility—SneakPeek Pro can generate its preview from the actual file data.) Double-click on the preview to open the file.

Like SneakPeek Photo, SneakPeek Pro shows you additional details about the file. At the top of the preview you’ll see the file name, type, and size, as well as the creation and modification dates and times. To the right is a useful list of all fonts, images, and color swatches used in the file.

One limitation of SneakPeek Pro is that for some document types, it’s dependent upon the preview data saved within the file. For example, if you save your InDesign files with Small or Medium preview images, you’ll see a lower-resolution preview that may replace smaller font sizes with gray boxes. Saving your files with higher-quality previews avoids this and gives you the best Quick Look previews.

Because Mac OS X’s Cover Flow feature takes advantage of Quick Look plug-ins, installing SneakPeek Pro also lets you browse high-quality previews of your graphics files in the Finder’s Cover Flow view. Similarly, SneakPeek Pro lets the OS display high-resolution previews within Open and Save dialogs, and in the Finder’s Column view. It’s a great OS add-on if you frequently work with these types of files.

Macworld Art Director Rob Schultz graciously contributed to this article.

SimplyDisk simplifies custom disk-image creation

Earlier this year, we covered DMG Canvas, an easy-to-use utility for creating custom disk images—the kind you often encounter when installing software, complete with custom backgrounds, license agreements, and installation instructions—and custom CD and DVD layouts. Another good option is SimplyDisk; while it looks and functions very much like DMG Canvas, it includes a few useful options DMG Canvas is missing.

When you launch SimplyDisk, you see a blank rectangle representing your disk-image window—how the window will appear on the user’s screen when the disk image (or disc) is mounted. Click on the ruler icon to set the window’s size and onscreen position. You can manually enter numeric dimensions and coordinates, or you can drag-resize the virtual window and drag it around SimplyDisk’s virtual Desktop—the latter options are improvements over DMG Canvas, which provides only numerical options.

Next, drag into the virtual window any items—software, documents, or folders—you want included on your disk image and choose the size of their icons, from 16 to 128 pixels square. A snap-to-grid feature makes it easy to line up icons precisely. If you’re distributing software and want to include an alias to the user’s /Applications folder, just click the tiny application-folder icon at the top of the SimplyDisk window.

(Image courtesy of OakSoft)

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FolderGlance lets you peek inside folders (and files)

I previously covered FinderPop, a great utility that, among its myriad features, lets you see what’s inside a folder in the Finder by simply right-clicking on that folder—you get a hierarchical menu of its contents. But if that’s the main FinderPop feature you want, FolderGlance is a good substitute—although it costs a bit more.

With FolderGlance installed, right-clicking (or Control-clicking) on a folder in the Finder pops up a contextual menu that includes that folder; mousing to the folder’s name shows you a hierarchical list of the folder’s contents. Choose an item to open it.

(When using FolderGlance, the Finder’s standard contextual-menu options are hidden in a new Finder submenu. This is great for keeping the FolderGlance contextual menu uncluttered, but it does mean an extra level of menu navigation to get to the Finder’s own options. You can avoid this step by holding down the Shift key when right-clicking on an item; this shows the standard Finder contextual menu instead of FolderGlance.)

You can also designate custom folders that always appear in the Finder’s contextual menus. This feature makes it easy to quickly open a file or folder inside one of those folders. But even better is that you can move or copy an item into a custom folder: right-click on the item you want to move, navigate (via the resulting contextual menu) to the desired location inside a custom folder, and then choose Move Selection Here. Holding down the Option key copies the item instead; holding down the Shift key creates an alias.

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Jitouch adds new gestures to Multi-Touch trackpads

I’m a big fan of the Multi-Touch trackpads on Apple’s recent laptops; by letting you use various gestures to perform actions, this technology makes the trackpad much more useful than when laptop input devices allowed only pointing and clicking.

Unfortunately, Mac OS X doesn’t let you customize these gestures, or add new ones, which is why I loved MultiClutch. As I showed in a Macworld video, MultiClutch let you assign particular gestures to particular actions or keyboard shortcuts. Sadly, MultiClutch doesn’t currently work in Snow Leopard.

I recently discovered an alternative, Jitouch, which instead of letting you customize gestures, adds eight new sets of them. Once you launch Jitouch—it’s an application, rather than a kernel extension, preference pane, or system hack—you can perform the following types of actions using trackpad gestures:

• Switch to the next or previous tab (for Web browsers only)
• Open a link in a new tab (for Web browsers only)
• Minimize a window
• Zoom a window
• Move and resize a window
• Close a window or tab
• Open a recently closed tab (for Firefox only)
• Quit an application

Rather than attempt to describe each gesture, I encourage you to check out the developers’ Gestures page, which provides clear descriptions and demonstrations of each gesture. In addition, the developer has posted two videos on YouTube, one showing each gesture, the other demonstrating Jitouch’s gestures in action.

What I like best about Jitouch is that it lets you perform, with a single-hand gesture, actions that would otherwise require switching to the keyboard, accessing a menu, or using two hands. In other words, it lets you keep your fingers on the trackpad.

Via Jitouch’s preferences, you can choose to disable particular gestures if you don’t use them or if you find yourself accidentally performing them. (You can temporarily disable all gestures via Jitouch’s menu-bar menu.) You can also adjust the force and speed needed for gestures to be recognized. If you’re left-handed, you’ll appreciate the option to reverse Jitouch’s gestures.

These gestures do take some practice; the developers claim that in order to avoid stepping on OS X’s built-in gestures, and to prevent too many accidental triggers, some gestures are purposely more complex than others. But I found that after just a few days of use, I had already incorporated several of the gestures into my trackpad habits.

As noted in the list above, some gestures are limited to Web browsers; in addition, you can’t currently customize Jitouch’s gestures. But the Jitouch Web site promises that upcoming versions will include support for such customization, as well as gestures for switching between workspaces in OS X’s Spaces feature and switching between windows. I’m looking forward to those features.

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Delibar makes Delicious bookmarking easy and attractive

Delicious is a popular social-bookmarking service—so popular that Yahoo bought it—that lets you save bookmarks "to the cloud" (in other words, online). You can access your saved bookmarks from any browser on any computer, share them with friends, and, thanks to the social nature of Delicious, see what's popular based on what others are bookmarking. But to truly make Delicious useful, you need a good tool that gives you access your bookmarks as conveniently as the old, busted bookmarks menu in your Web browser. Delibar is just such a tool, and it greatly improves the experiences of accessing and sharing your Delicious bookmarks.

Delibar offers a gorgeous, non-intrusive way to both use your Delicious bookmarks and create new ones. You can configure the program to run in the Dock or in the menu bar. You can also activate Delibar via keyboard shortcuts, letting you quickly search your bookmarks, view a list of your most recent bookmarks, and see bookmarks saved by your network of friends and those you follow.

To keep you working instead of bookmarking, Delibar provides shortcuts and bookmarklets for saving the frontmost tab or window of your browser, recommending frequently used tags in the process. And if you've got multiple accounts—for example, one for your personal bookmarks and another for collaborating with others at work—you can select, on the fly, which one to use.

Besides making the Delicious experience more accessible and efficient, Delibar's best features involve searching and sharing your bookmarks. You can use Google-like search queries to find specific phrases or to omit particular terms, and several pre-defined Special searches are available; for example searching for @top5 searches for the top five most-frequently accessed bookmarks. If you frequently search for a specific tag or link, you can "tear off" that search-results window to keep it visible on your desktop.

One of my favorite aspects of Delibar is its social focus. Clicking a button next to any Delicious bookmark allows you to share that link via email, Twitter, and Facebook, or to blog it with MarsEdit. Delibar can become a sort of organizational and social hub for all the sites you see fit to bookmark and share.

One drawback to Delibar is that it doesn’t present your bookmarks in a folder-style list the way most browsers and bookmark tools do; instead, you must search for bookmarks or rely on the program's list of most-recent bookmarks. (This is especially disappointing since pre-release versions of Delibar actually offered a list view.) Granted, searching in Delibar is very quick, especially once you're familiar with Delibar’s keyboard shortcuts, and the tear-off search window also helps. Still, I hope Shiny Frog brings back some kind of tag/folder view in a future update.

I've followed Delibar's progress over the last couple of years, through a number of pre-release versions that experimented with different ways of interacting with the Delicious service. Version 1.0 is a massive upgrade from those versions, and it has what is easily the most attractive and progressive interface of any Delicious client I've seen. Despite the considerable drawback of not having a complete bookmark menu, Delibar’s ease of use, keyboard shortcuts, search feature, and beautiful interface have earned it a spot in my menubar.

(While the full version of Delibar is $18 at current exchange rates, once the program's two-week demo expires, Delibar continues to function in a free mode that's limited to searching your Delicious bookmarks.)

Updated 11/5/2009, 9:40pm: Updated price, which changed the day after this review was published; added information about free limited-feature version.

SMART Utility monitors your hard drives' health

A few years ago, I covered SMARTReporter, a simple, free utility for monitoring your drives’ Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) status. As I explained at the time, SMART is technology built into all modern hard drives that monitors various parameters of a drive’s performance—temperature, error rates, and more—warning you if any of them is out of the normal range.

The problem with SMART is that it requires software on the host computer that queries the drive for its SMART status and then reports that status to the user. While SMARTReporter is useful for basic SMART monitoring, SMART Utility offers more features and provides more details about each drive’s health.

(Note that SMART works only with PATA and SATA drives connected directly to a PATA or SATA bus; very few FireWire and USB enclosures pass SMART data to the host computer. This means that SMART-monitoring software can’t warn you of possible problems with external drives. In addition, it’s worth noting that a drive’s SMART status won’t warn you about every drive failure—it can’t generally predict instantaneous, catastrophic failure, and it won’t detect software issues such as a corrupt disk directory—but it can alert you to potential failures indicated by unusual SMART values.)

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PTHPasteboard Pro provides multiple Clipboards and much more

As a writer and editor, I couldn’t be nearly as productive as I am without a multiple-Clipboard utility—a program that stores multiple recent contents of the Clipboard, letting you paste any of them quickly and easily. In addition to the productivity gains such utilities offer, they also protect you from losing important content because you copied or cut it, then absentmindedly copied or cut something else, replacing that content, before you had a chance to paste.

I’ve previously reviewed Jumpcut, PopCopy, and CuteClips, three multiple-Clipboard utilities that focus on simplicity and ease of use; Jumpcut remains one of my favorite OS X add-ons. But if you’re willing to forego some of that simplicity, PTH Pasteboard Pro offers a whole lot more functionality.

Like other such utilities, every time you copy or cut content—text, images, and so on—to the Clipboard, PTHPasteboard Pro automatically adds that content to its own list of Clipboard contents, which the developer calls a pasteboard; you choose how many items the pasteboard holds, as well as the maximum size of items to be saved. You can access those contents via a separate pasteboard window or—my preference—a menu-bar menu. Click on an entry in the window or menu to immediately paste it into the current document or text field.

(Two bonuses you get with the window approach, instead of the menu-bar menu, are a search field for finding particular text—a great feature if you can’t remember when you cut that important paragraph you forgot to paste—and a larger preview of the contents of a particular pasteboard buffer by holding the cursor over that item.)

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Dictionary Cleaner lets you edit your spell-check dictionaries

A convenient feature of Mac OS X is its built-in spell checker, used by most Apple programs and accessible to any developer that wants to include the feature in their software. For example, BBEdit provides a number of spelling features based on OS X’s spell checker.

You can add words to OS X’s built-in dictionaries (or, described more accurately, add words to a supplemental custom dictionary that OS X will also reference when checking spelling), by right-clicking on a flagged-as-misspelled word and choosing the option to learn that word. This is an especially useful feature if, like me, you frequently work with words—technical terms and the names of products, companies and people—that don’t appear in most spelling dictionaries.

The problem, however, is that once you’ve added words to OS X’s dictionary, there’s no way to edit those additions. Perhaps you accidentally added an incorrect spelling, or maybe you just wanted to avoid a particular word being flagged during a particular article or project. Mac OS X simply doesn’t provide an easy way to edit the dictionary. Similarly, there’s no way to add a new word without typing it in a document or text field, spell-checking that text, and then adding the word once it’s been flagged as misspelled.

Two AM Software’s Dictionary Cleaner 1.5 is a simple utility—actually a System Preferences pane—that provides basic dictionary-editing capabilities. Open the pane, choose the dictionary you want to edit (for me, English), and Dictionary Cleaner shows a list of all words you’ve added, sorted alphabetically.

Select a word and click on Edit to edit that entry, or click on Delete to remove it completely. To quickly find a word, type the first few letters in the Filter field. (Unfortunately, the Filter field is case-sensitive—typing Super will find SuperDuper, but typing super won’t.)

You can also use Dictionary Cleaner to add new words to your spelling dictionary; just click on Add and type the new word. One feature I’d like to see is the capability to import a text file containing a list of words, rather than typing each manually.

Dictionary Cleaner is easy to use and fills an obvious hole in OS X’s feature set. But it promises to get better: the developer of Dictionary Cleaner is working on a big upgrade that will include support for the separate spell-checking dictionaries of Microsoft Office and Firefox, as well as the capability to synchronize those dictionaries with OS X’s own.

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Notify makes it easier to keep an eye on Gmail

If you use Gmail for your primary e-mail account, but don’t access it using a dedicated email client (or a dedicated Gmail app such as Mailplane), you know how much of a hassle it can be to periodically check the Gmail site for new messages. Thankfully, there are a good number of third-party programs and utilities that can alert you to new Gmail e-mail. I’ve recently been testing Notify , a simple menu-bar utility with an elegant interface and a nice set of features.

Notify sits unobtrusively in your menu bar. Once you’ve provided the username and password for your Gmail account, and chosen how often Notify should automatically check for new messages (every 1, 2, 5, 10, or 15 minutes), the program performs those routine checks and notifies you—via a highlighted menu-bar icon, a number in the menu bar indicating unread messages, or (my favorite) Growl notifications—when new messages are received. (Unfortunately, there’s no option for an audible alert.) You can also manually check for new messages via the Notify menu.

A click on Notify's menu-bar icon shows you a preview of each new message; double-click on one to view it in Gmail in your Web browser. Once you’ve viewed a message in Gmail—in other words, once the message is marked as read—it’s removed from Notify's window.

If you’ve got multiple Gmail accounts, you can add up to four of them to Notify; each account gets a separate tab in Notify’s interface. You can also choose separate notification preferences for each account.

Notify isn’t a full-blown Gmail client; as its name implies, it’s there to notify you of new messages. In addition, thanks to limitations in the technology Notify uses to interact with Google, Notify can show only a short preview of each message, and can show only the 20 newest unread messages. Finally, I experienced an issue where if an account didn’t have any new e-mail, sometimes messages from another account would show up in the “empty” account’s tab.

Still, Notify is a handy way to keep an eye on your Gmail accounts without having to watch the Web site. And the developers aren’t sitting still: Vibealicious has just announced Notify 2.0. A $10 version will add a good number of additional features, including the capability to view more messages (and more of each), to compose and reply to messages without having to open Gmail in your browser, and to monitor MobileMe and Google Apps accounts.

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Bevy brings a unique view to application launching

Between the Dock, Spotlight, and innumerable third-party utilities, I’m always surprised when I find a new approach to application launching for Mac OS X. But Bevy is just that. Press a keyboard shortcut, or click on Bevy’s menu-bar icon, and Bevy pops up a graphical display of all applications on your Mac, with currently running programs highlighted. (See the screenshot at the bottom of this article.) Click on a program’s icon to launch (or switch) to it. It’s a unique—and even fun—approach to working with applications. In my testing, I found it also helped me rediscover stuff I’d forgotten I’d installed.

Do you have so many programs installed that the default Bevy view is a bit overwhelming? Bevy lets you customize it in several ways. For starters, you can exclude a particular program from the display, although you have to perform this action separately for each program; there’s no way to exclude apps en masse. (There’s also no way to exclude entire folders; for example, I’d like to keep anything in /Applications/Games from showing up up in Bevy.) Convenient buttons at the top of the Bevy display let you quickly switch the view to show excluded programs, all programs, or just running programs.

Alternatively, you can filter the display by holding down a letter on your keyboard to highlight those programs whose names include that letter capitalized. In other words, holding down the T key will show TextEdit, Time Machine, and Twitterrific, but also iTunes and QuickTime.

You can also create folders of applications and point Bevy to them; each folder of applications is presented in a separate section in Bevy’s display. Unfortunately, Bevy doesn’t support aliases to applications, so you can’t create a folder containing aliases to your favorite programs and assign that folder within Bevy.

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