Latest Posts in Mac Gems

Promising prospect: Quiet Read

Back in early 2005, I covered URLwell, a clever menu-bar program that made it easy to store URLs you want to check out at a later time. Unfortunately, URLwell was last updated less than a month after I wrote that review, but I recently discovered a candidate for replacement: Quiet Read, which adds a few useful features of its own.

As with URLwell, when you come across a URL you want to save for later viewing—say, on a Web page, in an e-mail from a friend, or in a Twitter message—you just drag that URL to the Quiet Read icon in the menu bar. Quiet Read adds the URL to its menu, with a beep confirming the addition; the menu icon displays the number of links currently in the menu. The developer also provides a JavaScript bookmarklet for your Web browser; drag it into your browser bookmark bar, and clicking it adds the current Web page to Quiet Read.

You can view any saved URL by double-clicking it in the Quiet Read menu, or by selecting it and pressing Command+Return. (Why not just Return? Good question.) To delete an item, select it and press Command+Delete, or use the action menu at the bottom of the menu. (Pressing Option+Command+Delete opens a URL and deletes it from the menu simultaneously.) You can rename a URL by Option-clicking it—an action you'll likely perform frequently, as I found that a fair number of URLs display “Unknown title” as their name, instead of the actual page name, when added to Quiet Read.

(Image courtesy Bamboo Apps)

Most of the program’s features are accessible using keyboard shortcuts or keyboard navigation; in fact, you can access the menu itself using the keyboard shortcut of your choosing.

These features are free, but if you purchase the Pro version of Quiet Read for $10, you get a useful search/filter feature for quickly finding a link in the menu; the capability to send URLs to Instapaper and Read it Later for offline reading (and better formatting); and the capability to shorten URLs (using the tr.im service) for easier pasting in e-mail, Twitter messages, and the like.

Like URLwell, Quiet Read isn’t a bookmark manager; it’s for temporarily storing sites that you want to visit “sometime,” keeping them handy so you don’t forget them. Still, there are a few simple URL-management features I’d like to see, such as the capability to reorder URLs. Quick Read also has a few limitations in addition to those I mentioned above. For example, unlike URLwell, there’s no way to track which URLs you’ve visited, and you can’t export your stored URLs to a text or HTML file. You also can’t drag multiple URLs—or a text file containing URLs—into Quiet Read. And I find Quiet Read’s shades-of-gray color scheme to be difficult to read. Finally, Quiet Read’s menu behaves a bit oddly, requiring you to double-click the icon to display the menu.

Still, Quiet Read is, like URLwell, a better solution for storing URLs than tossing them in a text file or keeping a folder of Internet Location files in the Finder. And it provides more features than if you just saved those URLs to a bookmark folder in your browser. I’m looking forward to future versions.

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Espionage keeps your data safe from spying eyes

Mac OS X’s FileVault feature, which encrypts your entire user folder, is great for security. But because it stores your entire user folder as an encrypted disk image, it adversely affects performance, makes backups difficult, and—worst of all—can render all your data inaccessible if something bad ever happens to the monolithic encrypted disk image hosting your account.

As I explained when I reviewed Knox, an alternative is to use smaller encrypted disk images for particular types of data; for example, one for all your financial data, one for your work documents, and so on. You can create these disk images using OS X’s Disk Utility, but Knox makes the creation process easier, gives you a systemwide menu for convenient access to those images, and provides an automatic backup system that keeps older versions of each image in case one is ever damaged.

Knox remains one of my favorite Gems, but I’ve been testing another disk-image utility, Espionage, that’s got some compelling features of its own.

Like Knox, Espionage uses encrypted disk images to store sensitive data. However, Espionage performs a bit of Finder trickery to give you the illusion that you’re interacting directly with a protected folder, instead of a disk image—the program does all the disk-image work for you, behind the scenes.

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HandBrake remains a rockin' rippin' application

When, back in late 2006, we last looked at the free DVD-ripping tool HandBrake, it had just turned 0.9.0. And for its 0.9.0 birthday it gained greater ease of use, better picture quality, conversion presets, and advanced encoding features. In the several years since, HandBrake’s version number has advanced only to 0.9.4, but that seemingly small version increment actually reflects big changes.

In the interest of filling in the gaps between HandBrake 0.9.0 and the current version, I should mention what versions 0.9.1 through 0.9.3 brought to the table. Version 0.9.1 provided mostly bug fixes, while 0.9.2 introduced support for Dolby Digital 5.1 audio in MP4 files, iPhone-compatible anamorphic video, variable frame-rate encoding, and greater stability.

Version 0.9.3 brought a much more significant change: the loss of HandBrake's built-in DVD-decryption code, as HandBrake’s developers got out of the copy-protection-stripping business. However, they made no secret of the fact that if you installed a copy of VLC Media Player, HandBrake would take advantage of VLC's ability to skirt DVD copy-protection schemes, and thus allow you to rip commercial DVDs. (Such is the case today—you still need VLC to remove copy-protection from commercial DVDs when using HandBrake.)

Improvements in 0.9.3 included the capability to choose other video sources, including VIDEO_TS folders. Video quality was improved, as was audio-video synchronization. And Handbrake 0.9.3 tackled its fair share of bugs.

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Status Screen Saver and ScriptSaver

When I did a Macworld video on screen savers, it turned out to be surprisingly popular, despite the fact that screen savers are no longer must-haves—Mac users apparently still appreciate idle-time visuals.

But there are also screen savers that are useful. Not because they occupy your screen when you’re otherwise busy, but because they serve a useful purpose while occupying your screen. For today’s Gems, I’ve picked two of my favorite useful screen savers, Status Screen Saver and ScriptSaver.

Status Screen Saver

If you enjoy a good screen saver, but you also want to be able to keep an eye on incoming communication and other important info, Status Screen Saver can help. This screensaver lets you choose any other screen saver as its visual background, but displays, along the bottom of your screen, icons for the applications and data you choose, along with the status of each.

Status Screen Saver currently supports ten applications and three types of system data. For each application you choose—your options are Adium, iCal, iChat, Google Notifier, Mail, NetNewsWire, Skype, Things, Twitterrific, or Vienna—you’ll see the application icon along with a numeric display indicating the number of new messages, articles, or tasks. For the system modules—Battery, Time, or Uptime—you see a representative icon and the remaining battery life, the time, or your Mac’s current uptime, respectively.

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Rocketbox enhances Mail's searching

Mail’s Spotlight-based search feature stands up reasonably well to heavy use, but as your e-mail archives begin to swell, Mac OS X’s indexing can’t quite keep up—the bigger your Mail archives, the slower Spotlight searches in Mail become.

Enter Rocketbox, a new plug-in for Mail that augments Mail’s search capabilities and claims to increase the speed of searches by up to 200 times. While that claim may be optimistic, Rocketbox does give you search capabilities Mail can't match on its own.

The first time you launch Mail after installing Rocketbox, Rocketbox indexes your Mail archives. The length of the process depends on how many messages you have in Mail: In our testing, it took nearly half an hour to index just over 50,000 messages across three different e-mail accounts. Once indexing is complete, your Mail searches—whether you initiate them in Mail’s Search field or in the optional Rocketbox window—are handled by Rocketbox.

(One difference you’ll notice immediately is that unlike Mail’s stock search, which begins displaying results as you’re typing, Rocketbox doesn’t show results until you finish entering your search term and press Return; doing so opens the Rocketbox window to display the results.)

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Movist plays your movies when QuickTime can't

VLC Media Player has long held the crown of “best free, handle-anything media player” for Mac OS X. But these days, there are a number of quality alternatives, including MPlayer OS X Extended (which we'll be looking at soon) and today's Gem, Movist. Movist has been around since 2007, but it’s made some big development strides over the past six months or so. The current version offers VLC some much-needed media-playback competition thanks to an interface that I find to be more attractive and easier to use.

Like VLC, Movist is based in part on FFmpeg, a cross-platform set of codecs that lets you play a plethora of media formats not supported by OS X’s own QuickTime technology. Movist also provides many playback features you won’t find in QuickTime Player, as well as some features QuickTime Player lost in the transition from version 7 to Snow Leopard’s version X.

For example, Movist offers a wide range of playback navigation options, including variable-speed playback, frame-by-frame playback, configurable-second skips, and range playback (where you set the beginning and end of a clip). There's also a built-in screenshot feature that lets you save an image of the current video frame.

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ShrinkIt shrinks your PDFs

There are a number of Mac utilities that will compress PDF files for easier e-mail sending, or, for developers, to reduce the size of an application bundle that includes lots of PDFs; PDFshrink and PdfCompress are just a couple examples. But many people don’t realize that Mac OS X’s own Preview application can reduce the size of PDF files without any additional software—and without actually performing any compression. You just open a PDF in Preview and then save it (as a PDF) again; the resulting file will usually be significantly smaller than the original with no difference in quality.

(Note that Preview Save dialog includes, in the Quartz Filter pop-up menu, a Reduce File Size option. However, this option uses compression, so it reduces the quality of images and text in the resulting PDF. If you simply re-save a PDF, without this option, no compression occurs.)

How does this work if Preview isn’t actually compressing images? The program is simply using OS X’s built-in PDF-processing features to strip PDF files of all the unnecessary bits: preview images, metadata, and the like. This feature is especially useful for PDFs created in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, which tend to be unnecessarily large because of program-specific components and other non-vital data these applications save inside each PDF.

But if you’ve got a bunch of PDFs to shrink, or if this is a task you perform on a regular basis, opening and re-saving each file separately is a hassle. Just ask the fine folks at Panic, makers of Mac Gems CandyBar and Transmit: They were using the Preview-save trick to reduce the size of the many PDF graphics inside each of the company’s programs. To save time and effort, they wanted a way to automate this process...so they created an app for that.

The result is ShrinkIt, a simple, free utility that uses OS X’s PDF capabilities to quickly shrink PDF files. You just drop one or more PDFs onto the ShrinkIt icon, or into the ShrinkIt window, and in a few seconds you’ll have smaller versions of those files, saved in the same location as the originals; each original is renamed with org at the beginning of its name.

As an example of ShrinkIt’s effectiveness, I dropped 13 InDesign-created PDFs—each of which was saved with InDesign’s extra options disabled, so the files should have already been as small as possible—onto ShrinkIt. The resulting batch of files was 25 percent smaller: 16.3MB compared to the original 21.7MB. In my testing, ShrinkIt was able to reduce the file size of PDFs containing a combination of text and images by as much as 35 percent, although I’ve seen reports of shrinkage of up to 95 percent for files that contain mostly vector images. (The procedure works best on vector PDFs with lots of extraneous data, so ShrinkIt won’t provide significant file-size reduction for every PDF. In fact, for some PDFs that include lots of bitmap content, the resulting file can actually be larger than the original—sometimes significantly so.)

If you regularly work with PDF files, ShrinkIt is a great utility to keep around to keep your PDFs slim without affecting their readability or image quality.

Updated 2/18/2010, 10:45am: Clarified difference between re-saving a PDF and re-saving using the Reduce File Size option.

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BashFlash handles misbehaving Flash

We’re big fans of ClickToFlash, the Safari plug-in that lets you choose which bits of Flash content, on which Websites, get loaded—blocking everything else. But as good as ClickToFlash is, it can’t protect you from Flash you’ve approved. Those bits of Flash can still hog processor cycles, waste battery life, and lock up your browser.

Apple provided some help with Safari 4, which (in Snow Leopard) separates Safari’s own processes from the processes of browser plug-ins, but the main benefit of this feature is that if Flash crashes, it doesn’t take your browser down with it. If Flash doesn’t crash, it can still make Safari submit to the Spinning Beachball of Death—even as a devoted user of ClickToFlash, I’ve occasionally found Safari unresponsive thanks to Flash I've approved, or to the cumulative effect of Flash across a number of sites. And approved Flash can still tax your CPU and suck the life out of your battery.

That’s where BashFlash comes in. This utility monitors the Flash process, using a systemwide menu-bar icon to indicate Flash’s CPU use. If Safari is starting to bog down, a quick glance at the menu bar will give you a clue as to whether or not it’s Flash that’s causing the problem: a dimmed BashFlash icon means no Flash content is currently loaded; a black icon means Flash content is loaded but not using much of your processor; a red icon means high CPU use—30 percent or more—by Flash.

The BashFlash icon with no Flash loaded (left), Flash loaded with low CPU use (center), and Flash loaded with high CPU use (right)

If the BashFlash icon is glowing and Safari is crawling (or you’re concerned that Flash content you’re not actively using is draining your laptop battery), you have a few options for action. If you know which site is responsible—I’m looking at you, horrible, horrible sites based entirely on Flash—you can simply close that tab or window. But you may still want to view the non-Flash content on the offending page, or the problem may be a bunch of Flash content across multiple sites.

In these situations, BashFlash offers a more aggressive alternative: click the BashFlash menu and choose Kill Flash Plugin. As the command name implies, this kills Flash—and just Flash—across all Web pages in Safari, leaving your browser windows and tabs otherwise intact; each bit of Flash content is simply replaced with Safari’s “missing plug-in” icon.

If you want to reload any bit of Flash content, just reload its Web page; only approved Flash content on that page is loaded.

(I would love it if BashFlash could figure out which site is dragging your browser down, and let you kill Flash only on that site; unfortunately, the Flash plug-in runs as a single process, regardless of how many bits of Flash it’s handling.)

As Macworld contributor John Gruber noted earlier this week, BashFlash is a nice complement to ClickToFlash. Since I started using ClickToFlash just over a year ago, Safari has crashed fewer than a handful of times, despite the fact that I regularly have dozens of tabs open. Since I started using BashFlash a couple months back, Safari—or, more accurately, the Flash plug-in—no longer monopolizes my CPU (or drains my MacBook’s battery) unless I let it.

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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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