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Mac Gems The very best in low-cost Mac software and hardware
Justnotes is an elegant notes app that syncs across devices
Unlike iOS’s Notes, OS X’s built-in app for quick notes, Stickies, goes beyond simple text. Still, it feels dated these days, and perhaps its biggest flaw is that it doesn’t sync across Macs or with your iOS devices. If you’re looking for something a bit more modern that lets you create and manage text notes, and access those notes anywhere you’ve got an Internet connection, Justnotes (Mac App Store link) may be the solution.
Justnotes’s main window uses the now-familiar two-paned interface: a list of your notes on the left, with the content of the selected note on the right. (You can choose to show a preview in the list for each note’s contents—one, two, three, or four lines.) The first line of each note is displayed in bold as the note title, and next to each note’s title is the date the note was last modified; for items modified today, you see the time of the last change. A search field lets you quickly find all notes containing your search string; instances of that string are highlighted within each note. You can sort the notes list alphabetically or by creation or modification date.
Select a note and you can immediately edit it in the right-hand pane; double-click a note to open it in a separate window for editing. To create a new note, you simply click the pen-on-paper button, press Command+N, or choose File: New Note. Justnotes also offers a handy, systemwide keyboard shortcut that brings Justnotes forward and creates a new note, making it easy to enter some quick text regardless of which app you’re currently using.
The notes window
Mac Gems for even less cash
The Mac Gems blog is all about reviews of great, inexpensive software, but I occasionally highlight a good deal on Gems, as well. Today is one of those times, as I’ve got a couple notable promotions to cover.
First, the time-sensitive one: Over at $2 Tuesday, you can get two past Mac Gems and a future Gem (though you didn’t hear that from me) for the paltry sum of $2 each:
Dropzone makes it easy to move, upload, or share files using a simple, drag-and-drop interface.
Compartments (; 2010 review) is a nifty home-inventory app that makes it easy to catalog your belongings, as well as to track product warranties.
Socialite (; 2010 review) lets you follow your favorite people and sites on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Google Reader, and RSS—all from within a single app. Socialite also makes it easy to share the stuff you find.
Second, for the next month, the current bundle from the folks over at The Mac Bundles consists entirely of previous Mac Gems. For $40, you get these ten apps:
Promising Prospect: EdgeCase enhances multiple-display setups
Fitts’s Law: If you’re like most computer users, you’ve never heard of it, yet it’s one of the foundations of a good software interface. To oversimplify, Fitts’s Law says that the larger an onscreen object is, and the closer that object is to the pointer, the less time it takes to access the object. Thus, it takes less time and effort to access bigger interface elements (buttons, menus, folders, and the like) than smaller ones at a given distance.
One of the most significant applications of Fitts’s Law relates to the edges of your computer screen. Because the pointer can’t go beyond those edges, any interface element positioned along a screen edge effectively has an infinite dimension: height (along the top or bottom of the screen) or width (along either side of the screen). In other words, the screen edge eliminates an entire dimension of precision. This is why it’s so easy to access menus and the Dock in OS X, and why screen-corner activations for Mission Control and Exposé are so easy to use: Flick the cursor to an edge or corner of the screen, and the pointer stops at exactly the right distance. Fitts’s Law is a large part of why the Mac’s menu bar is attached to the top of the screen.
Unfortunately, one of the Mac’s other great features, support for multiple displays, conflicts with Fitts’s Law. When you add a second display, you remove the boundary along the screens’ shared edge, and the cursor moves freely between the two displays. This is often what you want, but if you’ve got stuff—folders on the desktop or application palettes, for example—along that edge, accessing those items requires much more precise pointer movement, because the screen edge no longer keeps you from overshooting.
This is all interesting stuff, but what’s it have to do with Mac Gems? Because today’s Promising Prospect, EdgeCase, is designed to restore that lost screen boundary when you have multiple displays. With EdgeCase running, whenever the pointer hits the shared edge between two displays, it stops dead. This works regardless of which direction the pointer is coming from—moving from Display 1 to Display 2, or vice versa.
To-do app Due delights on the Mac
I was a big supporter of reminder-and-timer app Due for iOS when it launched back in 2010. The app was—and remains—simple and well-designed, and it kept me actually updating my tasks rather than starting a list and ignoring it for months. Since that debut, Due has added integration with calendar app Agenda, the capability to share reminders, and syncing between iOS devices using Dropbox or iCloud.
Now, Phocus, the developer of Due, has released Due for the Mac (Mac App Store link), offering the same reminder, timer, and log support as the iOS version in an OS X-optimized interface. The program retains the simplicity of the original app while effectively transitioning to the Mac’s point-and-click environment.
Adding a new reminder is simple.
DragonDrop makes moving things more convenient
Moving an item between two different folders or drives usually involves opening two Finder windows: one for the folder currently hosting the item, the other showing the place to which you want to move the item. (Mac OS X’s pop-up folders can help, but they still require that the destination folder, or some folder or drive enclosing it, be visible in the Finder or in the Dock.) Similarly, if you use OS X’s Mission Control or Spaces feature, or the full-screen mode of Lion (OS X 10.7), it can be a hassle to move files and content between applications and workspaces.
Back in January, I reviewed Yoink, a utility that gives you a virtual shelf for temporarily storing content. DragonDrop (Mac App Store link) is a new utility that offers similar functionality, albeit in a package that’s simpler but less intrusive.
With DragonDrop running, you simply drag an item—a file, a folder, text from a document, a photo from a webpage—onto the DragonDrop icon in the menu bar. A small shelf appears, floating above all other windows and displaying the item’s icon; the shelf follows you across workspaces and full-screen apps. Once you navigate to the destination, you just drag the item off the shelf to move it to the destination; the shelf disappears.
Lion DiskMaker makes it easier to create a bootable Lion installer
I’ve written quite a bit about installing Lion (OS X 10.7) and about the benefits of creating a bootable installer disc or drive. While the latter process isn’t prohibitively difficult, it’s still a bit of a hassle. Developer Guillaume Gète has made it a bit easier with Lion DiskMaker, an AppleScript-based utility that mostly automates the procedure.
Launch Lion DiskMaker, and it checks your Applications folder for a copy of the Lion installer app. Assuming it finds the installer in that location, Lion DiskMaker then asks if you want to create an installer DVD or a boot disk, with the latter meaning a flash drive or an external hard drive.
Choose Burn A DVD, and you’re prompted to insert a blank, 4.7GB (single-layer) DVD. Unfortunately, you don’t see a progress bar while the disc is being burned—the DVD is simply ejected when it’s finished. On my 2010 iMac, it took about 17 minutes to burn the disc. You can boot from the DVD by inserting it into your Mac, restarting, and holding down the C key at startup to force your Mac to boot from the optical drive.
Mashduo quickly compares iTunes libraries
Mine was originally a mixed marriage: I’m a Mac, my wife was a PC. Years ago, though, after yet another virus had rendered my beloved’s Windows machine unusable, I insisted she switch. (She did so begrudgingly, but she’s since become a contented Mac user.) I smoothed the transition by copying all of her old files from her Windows PC to her Mac, but some tracks from her iTunes library, for whatever reason, didn’t made the leap.
At the time, we didn’t bother to figure out which tracks were missing, but for my wife’s birthday this year, I decided I’d finally find those tracks and bring them over to her Mac. I’d assumed it would be a painstaking process: I’d need to look for a couple hundred songs—out of thousands—that existed on the old PC but not her Mac. And, of course, her library has grown substantially since the switch, so comparing the two libraries would be far from simple.
Luckily, I discovered Mashduo, a free Mac app that makes quick work of the process. You just feed it a pair of iTunes-library XML files, and it shows you which songs exist in one library but not the other.
You just drag an exported library file into each of Mashduo’s two wells.
Seamless transitions your music from Mac to iOS effortlessly
Back when I had a morning commute, I would often pop in some earbuds before hopping on the bus and rock out to one of the many tunes on my iPhone as we rode through Chinatown. The problem, of course, came when I reached my desk mid-song: Did I pause and try and find the song on my Mac’s iTunes library? Or did I continue to listen through my iPhone, only to look up hours later and realize I’d drained my phone’s battery when I should have switched to my desktop?
Luckily, there was Seamless (Mac App Store link), a little app—actually, a pair of apps, a free one for the Mac and a $2 app for the iPhone—to rescue me from this daunting first-world problem.
Seamless allows you to easily transition a song, podcast, or audiobook mid-play from your Mac to an iOS device, and vice versa. The Mac and iOS apps even coordinate fades on each device, bringing the volume of “Don’t Stop Believin’” down on your Mac as it cranks up the volume on your iPhone. Both devices need to be on the same Wi-Fi network at the time of the transition, and, of course, each must have access to the same audio file to pull this off, but fulfill those two criteria and you’ve got yourself a magic trick.
Gem Update: FreeSpace 1.1 improves drive monitoring and management
Given the increasing popularity of solid-state drives, with their smaller-than-hard-drive capacities, and the prevalence of drive-hogging media files, sometimes it feels like we’re back to the days when we constantly had to worry about filling up our drives.
Last November, I reviewed FreeSpace, a nifty app that displays, right in the menu bar, the boot volume’s free space, with a drop-down menu displaying the free space on every other mounted volume, organized by type (internal, external, network, disk image, and so on). It also gives you quick access to any mounted volume—choose one from the menu to open it in the Finder—and it’s the easiest way to unmounted connected volumes, thanks to the little eject button next to each volume in the menu. (A nice touch: The FreeSpace icon blinks to let you know when the volume has successfully unmounted.) There’s even an Eject All command to unmount everything but internal drives with a click.
I continue to use FreeSpace regularly, and it earned an honorable mention on my 2011 favorite-Gems list. The developer just released FreeSpace 1.1 (Mac App Store link), and the new version is considerably improved, addressing a number of my criticisms while adding even more useful features.
Clean Text helps you clean up messy text
Whether it’s the body of an email message that’s been forwarded too many times, or content you’ve copied from a PDF, sometimes you find yourself with messy content—text that has lots of odd characters and stray line breaks, for example—and you need to make it presentable. Previous Gem TextSoap is perhaps the best of text-cleaning utilities for Mac, but if you don’t need all of TextSoap’s features and capabilities, Clean Text (Mac App Store link) does an admirable job for only $10.
You can use Clean Text’s features in a few ways. The first is to simply paste your messy text into the Clean Text window. You can then click any of the program’s 35 preconfigured modifications, listed to the right, to perform that action on your text. The options are organized by type: Fix (reflowing paragraphs, removing quote characters, removing stray characters, converting tabs to multiple spaces and vice versa, and more), Transform (for example, converting simple punctuation to “smart” equivalents and vice versa, sorting lines, removing duplicate lines), Change Case, Convert (changing line-ending encodings, converting period runs to elipses, stripping non-ASCII characters), Reverse (to reverse text at various levels), and Fun (making text flow backward or upside down). There’s also a Quick Clean option that performs the most-common cleanup tasks with one click.
Apimac claims the Convert category includes an action to create ligatures for fi and fl, as well as to convert ligatures to their component letters. However, these actions weren’t available in my testing.
Master iTunes Match
- Set up and troubleshoot iTunes Match like a pro.
- Hands on with iTunes Match
- iTunes Match: What you need to know
- Secrets of iTunes Match
- iTunes Match's 25,000 Track Limit
- Check your music's iCloud Status
- iTunes Match: Many Apple IDs under one iCloud
- Toggle between iTunes Match and local syncing
- Three iTunes Match troubleshooting tips
- Fix iTunes Match Error tracks
- Genius and iTunes Match
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