Latest Posts in Mac Gems

Freedom locks down the Internet

Ah, the Internet: Fountain of information, smorgasbord of entertainment, nexus of social networking. Oh, and bane to productivity.

As anyone who’s procrastinated in the past decade knows, the Internet’s vast stores of instantly accessible content are nigh irresistible…especially when you’ve got work that needs doing. A few years back, I covered Think, a utility that visually blocks out all but the current program, and there’s also WriteRoom, a full-screen word processor for focusing on your writing. But while these utilities can help hide other programs, they can’t save you from yourself. That’s where Freedom comes in.

When running, Freedom—a name that's both apt and ironic—disables your computer’s Internet connection, preventing you from surfing the Web, checking e-mail, using Twitter, or engaging in any other activity that requires a network connection. (You can choose whether it also locks down local networking.) In the developer’s words, Freedom frees you “from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create.” It’s also useful for enforcing the kids’ no-Internet time.

(Freedom is similar to SelfControl, another Internet-blocking utility. But whereas SelfControl requires you to manually enter specific domains—for example, Twitter.com, YouTube.com, or your e-mail server—you want to avoid, Freedom blocks everything.)

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Google Email Uploader gets your old e-mail into Gmail

Google’s Gmail service offers vast amounts of storage, a unique approach to organization, one of the best e-mail-searching features around, and access to all your e-mail from any Web browser—all for the low, low price of free. And with a program such as Mailplane, you can even get many (though not all) of the niceties of a dedicated e-mail client.

In fact, some people like Gmail so much that they’ve moved their old mail—perhaps years and years of messages filed away in Eudora—into Gmail, giving them searchable access to their archives from anywhere. The problem is that while Gmail makes it easy to import messages from other Webmail systems (such as Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail), and you can import POP e-mail that’s still on your mail provider’s server, it hasn’t been a simple task to import older messages already on your computer.

If you’ve got a Google Apps-hosted Gmail account—not a standard Gmail account, unfortunately—there’s now an easier solution: the open-source Google Email Uploader for Mac. This utility provides a simple process for uploading your local e-mail to that Gmail account.

When you launch Google Email Uploader, it displays any Mail, Eudora, or Thunderbird mailboxes it finds in their default locations. You can also manually point the program to messages—in Mail mailboxes, mbox files, or maildir folders—stored elsewhere. Unfortunately, you can’t upload mail from a Microsoft Exchange account, even if you access that account in Mail. Similarly, Entourage isn’t currently supported; you’ll need to first convert Entourage mail to one of the supported formats.

You then choose your upload options: whether or not to preserve message properties (for example, read/unread, starred, or draft); whether or not to display the uploaded messages in your Gmail Inbox, and which labels to assign to messages. The program can automatically assign labels corresponding to mailbox names; so, for example, any e-mail messages in a Family folder in Mail will have a Family label when uploaded to Gmail. (Note that if you upload mail contained in subfolders—for example, in Work: Project B: January—those messages will get a separate label for each folder, rather than one long label.) You can also choose an additional label, such as today’s date, that will let you quickly view in Gmail all the messages included in this upload.

Finally, you provide your Gmail account name and password and click Upload. Depending on how many messages you’re uploading, the process will take anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours; the Upload Progress screen displays the progress of the upload, along with any errors. When the process is finished, the Skipped Messages screen lets you view each message that couldn’t be imported, along with the reason why. (If any of these messages are important, you can manually forward or redirect them, using your desktop e-mail client, to your Gmail account.)

One glitch reported by a user is that if your Internet connection is interrupted during the transfer, you must start over, which may result in duplicate messages; you should be sure you’ve got a reliable connection before starting. This is also a good argument for using the Assign Additional Label option to apply a unique label to imported messages: If the upload is interrupted, you can easily delete from Gmail any messages that were successfully imported, and then try the upload again.

Google Email Uploader’s biggest limitation is that, because it currently uses the Google Apps Email Migration API, it doesn’t work with standard Gmail accounts; you need Google Apps-hosted Gmail. Granted, you can set up a Google Apps account, which includes 50 e-mail accounts and support for Google Calendar and Google Docs, for free. But setting up e-mail in Google Apps isn’t dead-simple, and if you’ve already got a Gmail account you’ve been using for a while, chances are you want to keep using it. Here’s hoping a future version of Google Email Uploader adds support for standard Gmail accounts.

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More Gems I’m thankful for

Last fall—on Thanksgiving, appropriately enough—I wrote about a number of Gems I’m thankful for. That list wasn’t our most-recent compendium of all-time favorites, nor was it a preview of our since-published 2009 Gems of the Year article. Rather, as I noted at the time, it was “a list of Gems that I continue to use every day—Gems that have become such an integral part of my workflow that I often take them for granted.” That article turned out to be one of the most popular Gems-related stories of the year.

Well, it turns out that I missed quite a few of these “taken for granted” Gems. Why? Because they’ve become such an integral part of my workflow that I overlooked them while trying to root out the programs that have become an integral part of my workflow.

Ahem.

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Password Assistant exposes OS X’s built-in password generator

If you regularly read Macworld’s articles about computer security, you know the importance of a good password—meaning one that’s difficult to guess or crack. My personal tool of choice for creating secure passwords is the $40 1Password, thanks to its plethora of useful browser- and security-related features. But if all you really want is something to help you create secure passwords for online accounts, disk images, and other digital domains that store your personal information, it turns Mac OS X already includes just such a utility, called Password Assistant.

The problem is that OS X doesn’t make Password Assistant easily accessible. In fact, it’s made available only when OS X asks you to set up a new password—for example, when creating a new account, or when creating a new keychain entry in Keychain Access (in /Applications/Utilities); in these situations, you’ll see a tiny key button that opens Password Assistant.

OS X’s Password Assistant is usually hidden behind this tiny button in Accounts preferences and Keychain Access.

A more-convenient approach can be found in Codepoetry’s identically named Password Assistant. This utility, which Joe Kissell mentioned in his article on creating strong passwords, performs one simple task: when you launch it, it opens OS X’s Password Assistant. That’s it. You can place Codepoetry’s Password Assistant in your Dock, stick it in ~/Library/Scripts (so it appears in Mac OS X’s Scripts menu in your menu bar), or open it via your favorite launcher utility; however you launch it, you get instant access to OS X’s Password Assistant whenever you need to create a new password.

Mac OS X's Password Assistant

If you've never used OS X's Password Assistant, it lets you create a secure password of up to 31 characters in length, either manually or automatically. If you choose the latter approach, you can also choose the type of password you’d like: one that’s relatively easy to remember; one that consists of letters and numbers, only numbers, or random characters; or one that’s FIPS-181 compliant. You can then copy the new password and paste it wherever it’s needed. Password Assistant can also rate the security of your existing or manually-created passwords.

Password Assistant doesn’t provide any mechanism for keeping a record of secure passwords—a task at which 1Password excels—but if your passwords are mainly for Websites, disk images, and remote servers, OS X’s own keychain feature can store most of those for you.

Note: At the time of publication, Codepoetry’s Website was temporarily offline.

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SpaceControl keeps an eye on your available disk space

Earlier this week, I covered MiniUsage, a menu-bar utility for monitoring your Mac’s performance. As part of that review, I noted that MiniUsage doesn’t track the available space on connected hard drives. A useful tool for monitoring this data is SpaceControl.

Like MiniUsage, SpaceControl sits in your menu bar and shows the remaining free space on your startup volume. Click the SpaceControl icon and you see a list of the remaining space on each connected volume; you also see the sum of these numbers—the total free space available on all volumes. (Unfortunately, there’s no apparent rhyme or reason for the order of non-boot volumes in the menu. It would be nice if you could choose the order manually, or at least if the volumes appeared in alphabetical order.)

Displaying free space isn’t an unique feature; a number of other utilities provide similar functionality, including the excellent iStat Menus. What makes SpaceControl especially useful is its notifications. As I noted in our article about routine maintenance, it’s important to keep an adequate amount of free space on your boot volume: If your hard drive gets too full, performance can suffer and you run the risk of losing data.

SpaceControl actively watches your boot volume, and if the amount of free space dips below a configurable threshold (by default, 10 percent, but you can change the amount), you see an onscreen warning, receive an email, or both. The former option is useful for computers at which someone is actively working. The latter option is great for remote servers; it’s also useful for computers you maintain, officially or otherwise—say, the ones you take care of for family members spread out in various geographic locations.

SpaceControl offers the same notification service for non-boot volumes, and, in fact, lets you set a different threshold for those. (I’ve got mine set to 10GB.) You can choose to monitor all non-boot volumes (which, unfortunately, also includes mounted disk images and thumb drives), or just specific ones. The downside of this feature is that you can’t choose a different threshold for each non-boot volume; for example, I want to know when my Boot Camp or Media drive dips below 10GB, but I don’t really care about my scratch drive (which stores temporary files and downloads) until it dips below 1GB.

I also wish there was an option to hide the remaining-space display on the menu bar—showing just the SpaceControl icon—in order to save menu-bar space. And I found that SpaceControl’s text/number fields are a bit hinky: I occasionally had to close and re-open the program’s Preferences window to be able to enter text and numbers. But the program’s core functionality works well, and the program has already notified me several times about drives that are getting full.

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MiniUsage lets you monitor your Mac's activity

We’ve covered a number of Gems for keeping an eye on your Mac’s performance and activity, including MenuMeters, iPulse, and MemoryStick. I recently came across another useful option, MiniUsage, which makes some activity information easily accessible via a bit of space on your menu-bar.

With MiniUsage running, a small menu-bar display shows your choice of system-performance data: CPU usage (the percentage of your Mac’s processing power that’s currently in use), incoming network data rate, outgoing network data rate, or (on a laptop) battery. Alternatively, MiniUsage’s display can rotate through these statistics, changing every few seconds. You choose how often the statistics are updated, from every second to every five seconds.

Click on the MiniUsage menu, and the program shows you a live-updated, sorted list of the processes using the most CPU resources, along with the percentage of CPU use for each; you choose how many processes are displayed, from one to 20. This is a great way to quickly see which programs and processes are bogging down your Mac’s processor(s). Snow Leopard users can even switch to a program by choosing its name from the MiniUsage menu.

(One bug here is that if a process’s name includes a space, the second word of the name appears in the CPU-percentage field instead of that percentage. The process appears in the correct location in the list, but you don’t see the actual CPU-usage number.)

If your Mac has multiple processors or cores, the menu also displays what percentage of each core is currently being used; mouse over a core and a hierarchical menu shows how that usage is divided between system- and user-level processes.

The menu also displays the same network-throughput data you can opt to view in the menu bar, and mousing over the Detailed Information item in the menu shows you a pop-up view of the output of the top -l1 shell command (as if you’d entered that command in Terminal). Unfortunately, this display uses a proportional font, rather than a monospace one, so it’s nearly impossible to read—especially in Snow Leopard, where the output of top -l1 is already nearly useless.

Two bits of info I’d like to see in MiniUsage are memory usage (total and by process, just as the program displays CPU usage) and the available space on each connected volume. But given that MiniUsage was released less than a month ago, it’s a good bet the developer is already working on improving the program.

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LaunchCodes brings back 10.5-style document opening

As I wrote back in September, Snow Leopard changes the rules regarding how documents you create are opened—at least for certain file types. Although the long-established Mac OS creator codes are retained in Snow Leopard, they’re no longer used to determine which programs open which files. You can read my article for more detail on this change, but suffice it to say that it’s been bothering me a lot since the release of Snow Leopard.

Lately, though, it’s been bothering me much less, due to a nifty little program called LaunchCodes that forces the system to respect the creator code for file types you specify.

Once running, LaunchCodes works silently and quickly in the background. The program's only interface is a new icon on your menu bar. To configure LaunchCodes, choose Preferences from this menu. The preferences window displays four pre-configured file types: html, jpg, rtf, and txt. (These are classic Mac OS file types; the file extension and file type may differ for a given doc.) Next to each entry is the default application for that file type. For any type of file listed here, if a particular document has a creator code, double-clicking the document will open it in the application corresponding to that creator code (for example, R*ch for BBEdit); if the file doesn't have a creator code, it will open in the default application.

LaunchCodes' minimal preferences window

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GoodNight sleeps your Mac after downloads

Back in 2008, I reviewed Leech, an excellent download manager that takes the place of your Web browser’s file-download feature to provide a good deal more functionality. (Unfortunately, Leech appears to be no longer available, as the developer’s Website has been offline for some time now.) One of Leech’s convenient features is that the program can automatically shut down your Mac once all downloads have finished. But as much as I liked this feature, I found it odd that Leech couldn’t instead sleep your Mac when downloads were done.

Michael Hawelka's GoodNight can do just that, although instead of monitoring downloads, GoodNight monitors all your Mac’s network activity (well, almost; see below). This approach has the obvious benefit of working with any program; for example, you could start a late-night file download with an FTP or BitTorrent client, knowing your Mac would sleep when the download was complete. But GoodNight also monitors traffic from services provided by the operating system itself, such as File Sharing.

To set up GoodNight, first you choose which network port—Ethernet, AirPort, FireWire, and so on—you want the program to monitor. GoodNight cannot monitor multiple network interfaces, or all network traffic, simultaneously, although for most users, this won’t be an issue, as it’s a rare situation where you’d need to monitor more than one network interface.

Then you choose whether you want GoodNight to monitor download or upload traffic, and choose the “speed limit”—the threshold of traffic, in kilobits per second, below which GoodNight decides your Mac is inactive and puts it to sleep. Don’t worry about network traffic momentarily dipping below your limit; GoodNight uses a one-minute average—the average traffic rate over the previous minute—so fluctuating data rates won’t trigger sleep. Conversely, by using a minimum data rate, rather than no network traffic, as the sleep trigger, GoodNight allows your Mac to sleep even if, say, an Internet program continually pings a remote server to maintain a connection. A useful display shows the average network traffic rate over the past minute to help you determine what a good non-zero limit would be.

The final setting may be the most important: the time limit. Rather than immediately putting your Mac to sleep when the network data rate falls below your speed limit, you can choose to have GoodNight wait until network traffic has stayed below that limit for the duration of time you specify. This feature provides even more cushion for erratic connections, but it’s also useful if you’ve got a Mac that acts as a file server and you want it to sleep only after you’ve finished transferring various bunches of files. For example, I configured the program to put my file-sharing Mac mini to sleep after 10 minutes of low network traffic. The 10-minute time limit meant that the Mac didn’t go to sleep immediately after a particular file transfer was done; instead, I got a 10-minute “grace period” to start copying any other files.

Unfortunately, the longest time limit you can configure is 10 minutes. I found myself wishing I could set my Mac mini to sleep after an hour of no network activity. This would have prevented the mini from sleeping during business hours—during the day, I rarely go over an hour without accessing the mini over the network—but would have put it to sleep after the work day finished.

There’s also an option to have GoodNight start monitoring your network traffic only after your network data rate exceeds the speed limit. This is useful if you’re trying to download from a busy server: GoodNight waits until your Internet program makes a connection and begins to download the desired file, and then waits until that download completes to put your Mac to sleep. (A sub-setting here lets you designate a time limit for giving up on the connection; for example, if the data-transfer rate doesn’t pass the speed limit after 15 minutes, GoodNight can immediately put your Mac to sleep.)

In addition to the minor issues I mentioned above, a confusing aspect of GoodNight is that when choosing which network port to monitor, the options aren’t listed as Ethernet, AirPort, and FireWire. Instead, they use OS X’s under-the-hood designations: en0, en1, en2, fw0, and the like. If you don’t know which port is which, launch Network Utility (in /Applications/Utilities), click the Info tab, and then choose your current network interface from the pop-up menu; the designation in parentheses (for example, en1) is what you want to choose in GoodNight.

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Cinch makes two-up and full-screen windows a cinch

A few months back, I covered TwoUp and SizeUp, two utilities for managing windows on your Mac. TwoUp and SizeUp let you use keyboard shortcuts or a systemwide menu to arrange windows on the screen—for example, to place two (or three, or four) Finder windows next to each other to transfer files between them, to arrange several word-processing documents to compare their contents, or to position a BBEdit document next to your Web browser to preview your code.

The developer of TwoUp and SizeUp has since released another related utility, Cinch. Like TwoUp and SizeUp, Cinch makes it easy to resize windows to specific sizes and locations; however, Cinch limits your resizing and positioning options while making its functionality easier to access.

With Cinch installed, drag any window (via its title bar) to the left-hand side of the screen, and when your mouse cursor “bumps” against the edge, you’ll see an outline encompassing the left-hand half of your display. Release the mouse button and the window is resized to fill that outline. Drag another window to the right-hand edge of the screen and release and that window takes up the right half of the screen. By simply dragging the title bars of two windows against the edges of the screen (gotta love Fitt’s Law), you’ve perfectly split your screen between those windows. (When I first started using Cinch, I occasionally resized windows when I meant to just move them to the side, but it didn’t take long for me to get used to the “live” edges.)

Image courtesy Irradiated Software

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QuickBoot eases startup-volume switches

Today’s Mac Gem is a simple one, but it’s sure to be useful to developers, frequent users of Boot Camp, and anyone else who regularly boots their Mac from different startup volumes. A few years back, I covered BootChamp, a utility that lets you restart an Intel Mac into Boot Camp without having to open System Preferences and permanently change your startup disk, or without having to restart and hold down the Option key, waiting for OS X’s Startup Manager to appear.

If you frequently switch between booting into Mac OS X and Windows, or between different OS X startup volumes, an even better alternative is QuickBoot. QuickBoot provides a systemwide menu listing all bootable volumes along with the OS each contains. (In the case of Mac OS X, the menu lists the specific version number; there’s an option to also display build numbers. In the case of Windows, however, applicable menu items simply read Windows). Choose a volume from the menu, enter an admin-level username and password when prompted, and your Mac restarts using the chosen volume as the startup disk.

If you don’t want to waste precious menu-bar space on QuickBoot, it can also function as a standard program, appearing in the Dock and providing a standard Mac OS X window listing all bootable volumes. One advantage to this approach is that you can choose to reboot using the chosen volume either immediately or later (the next time you restart).

As with BootChamp, another benefit here over using the Startup pane of System Preferences is that your startup-disk setting isn’t changed permanently, so the next time you restart normally, your default startup volume is used. (I like this behavior, but it would be useful if there was an option—say, by Option-choosing a volume—to make your choice “permanent.”)

I did notice a couple minor issues with QuickBoot. First, if you change the name of a bootable volume, or eject a volume, you must relaunch QuickBoot for its list to reflect the change. The other is that neither QuickBoot’s menu nor its window indicate which volume is the current startup volume—an important bit of info if you frequently switch between multiple startup volumes. I’ve also seen reports that QuickBoot doesn’t maintain the default boot volume when used on PowerPC Macs; this feature apparently works only on Intel Macs.

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