Latest Posts in Mac Gems

App Store Expense Monitor tracks your iPhone-app spending

One of the appeals of the iPhone’s App Store is how easy it makes purchasing software. You just click a button, and in a few seconds the app is in iTunes, ready to be synced to your phone. Or you can purchase apps directly on the phone, bypassing your Mac altogether. This convenience, combined with ridiculously low prices, has made iPhone apps the ultimate impulse purchase for many people. It’s just a dollar or two, right?

If you’re like me, though, you may wonder how much all those one-click purchases add up to. After all, a few clicks here, a few clicks there, and pretty soon we’re talking real money, right? You can view your iTunes Store account’s purchase history in iTunes, but that shows you only 10 items at a time, and the list includes free updates, making it a real hassle to try to add everything up—especially if, like me, you’ve downloaded many, many apps over the past year.

Instead, try WetFish Software’s App Store Expense Monitor (ASEM), which sits in your menu bar and tells you the approximate total value of all your App Store purchases.

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USB Overdrive lets you control your input devices

For the past decade, Alessandro Levi Montalcini’s USB Overdrive has let Mac users control and customize their USB mice, keyboards, and gaming devices (and, more recently, Bluetooth mice). USB Overdrive generally provides more and finer-grained options than the software included with such peripherals, and it often allows Mac users to take advantage of hardware that has no official Mac support.

The latest version, USB Overdrive 3, functions as a 32- or 64-bit System Preferences pane and works in Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard. With the software, you can do things such as configure mouse button functionality for specific applications (the right button can act as a double-click in the Finder but as a Save button in BBEdit, for example); turn a wired or wireless Mighty Mouse into a left-handed device; or use the special media keys on many third-party keyboards without installing that device’s software.

For my tests, I removed Logitech’s mouse and keyboard software and installed USB Overdrive. I then programmed it for use with my Logitech diNovo keyboard Mac edition () and MX1100 mouse ().

I was able to set the MX1100's left button as a single-click, the right button as a double-click, and one of the thumb buttons as a control-click for contextual menus. Clicking on the scroll wheel button activated Dashboard by default, and everything else worked as expected. The scroll wheel functioned properly in all four directions, and the software offers individual controls for scrolling speed and acceleration in each direction. You can also set clicks to enter key combinations, activate system controls, launch applications, open files or folders, execute AppleScripts, and more.

I had few problems with the diNovo keyboard, however. As with many keyboards, the diNovo Edge has special keys for functions such as display brightness, Expose, Dashboard, iTunes playback, volume, and application launching. With Logitech’s drivers installed, those keys functioned properly. But with USB Overdrive, some keys worked and others didn’t. The developer explains that USB Overdrive generally takes over sections of keyboards (interfaces) that it can see, rather than individual keys, and that many vendors use non-standard or hidden code for their buttons. He has chosen not to try and support individual devices that don’t conform to regular human interface device (HID) guidelines. USB Overdrive does, however, include some workarounds for specific devices.

How do you know if a key is supported? When the USB Overdrive preference pane is open, clicking on a button adds it to the list of buttons that you can control. If you click on a button and nothing happens, then USB Overdrive can’t handle it. In the case of my keyboard, the keyboard's special commands overlay the F1 to F19 keys, so I could still activate the keyboard's built-in brightness controls, for example, by pressing the fn key along with F1 or F2 (as defined in OS X’s Keyboard preference pane).

USB Overdrive’s interface can also be a little tricky to figure out. The four options under the Settings tab are Any Mouse, Any Application; Any Gaming, Any Application; Any Keyboard, Any Application; and Any Other, Any Application. As you might guess, those controls are global. To create device- or application-specific controls, you need to choose the New Duplicate Settings command to copy those settings to a new set and then assign that set to a particular device or application. Once you do so, you have complete control over your devices. Interestingly, keyboard configurations don’t show up under the Keyboard option, but rather under Mouse and Other.

Existing USB Overdrive users (the previous version was called 10.4.8) should take note that version 3 can’t read preferences from older versions. So if you have lots of application- or device-specific settings, you’ll need to recreate them in the new version. But USB Overdrive 3 can now import and export its settings, so at least you’ll be able to move them from one Mac to another.

Despite its limitations, however, USB Overdrive offers Mac users with sophisticated button control that can reduce clicks and speed up productivity. And in my time using it, I’ve found it to be much more stable than any version of Logitech’s own software, which has caused problems for me for years.

Readability makes Web pages more readable

As Web sites have gotten more and more complex, many Web pages have become more and more difficult to read. Type is smaller, page layouts are getting more cluttered, and ads and other objects are breaking the flow of text. So I’m a big fan of programs and services that make the Web more readable.

Which leads me to today’s Gem, Readability, which, unlike most Gems, isn’t a program you download to your Mac, but rather an online service. Call it—with apologies to ESPN—a Web Gem.

Readability, a project of the Arc90 Lab, is a bookmarklet-based browser tool that reformats a Web page and presents the page’s text content in a plain, easy-to-read format. Inspired by Instapaper, the save-it-for-later-reading Web service, Readability lets you make almost any page more readable with a single click—or even a keyboard shortcut (see below).

To set up Readability, first you go to the Readability Web page and choose your settings—you get four choices each for layout style, font size, and margin width; a live preview shows each setting in action. (My personal choices are Novel style, Large text, and Medium margins.) Then you drag the Readability bookmark from the right-hand side of the Web page into the Bookmarks Bar in your Web browser. That’s all there is to it.

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TwoUp and SizeUp organize multiple windows

In my day-to-day Mac work, I frequently find myself positioning windows next to each other on the screen. For example, I often drag files between two or three Finder windows, and I frequently position two word-processing document windows—or BBEdit’s document window and Web preview window—side-by-side so I can compare their contents.

TwoUp and SizeUp are sibling utilities that aim to make such window arranging easier. The free TwoUp is designed to let you arrange two windows, each taking up half the screen, either next to each other or above and below each other. To use TwoUp, you select the first window and then use TwoUp’s systemwide menu or keyboard shortcuts to send that window to the top, bottom, left, or right half your screen. Then you choose the second window—which doesn’t have to in the same program—and send it to the opposite half of the screen. The two windows are perfectly aligned to fill the screen.

TwoUp works well for this basic task, although the program doesn’t support multiple displays. For that feature, and many others, you need to move up to SizeUp, which offers much more functionality.

SizeUp adds keyboard shortcuts and menu commands for quarter-screen windows, moving windows between multiple displays, and moving windows between workspaces in OS X’s Spaces feature. You can also easily make a window fill the screen, or center the window with particular dimensions.

If you don’t want windows to be pushed right up against each other or against the edges of your displays, SizeUp also lets you set custom margins—areas the windows won’t cover—both on the edges of the screen and in between windows. Finally, you can choose special options for handling window drawers as well as windows that might resize behind the Dock or offscreen.

One limitation of both TwoUp and SizeUp is that they don’t work properly with programs that don’t use standard Mac OS X window types—for example, Microsoft Office 2004 applications—as well as windows that don’t allow resizing or that have locked aspect ratios. But I’ve found that most programs I use work fine with TwoUp and SizeUp, and each can improve your productivity if you frequently work with multiple windows simultaneously.

Pricing note: Irradiated Software lists SizeUp’s price as “Name Your Price,” which means you’re supposed to pay what you think the software is worth to you. However, the developer suggests $13, “based on the cost of time, effort, and resources that went into developing SizeUp,” so that is the price we list here.

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Concentrate helps you focus on tasks

With all the distractions your Mac and its network connection can provide, it can be tough to get anything accomplished. A while back, I reviewed Think, a free utility for focusing on a particular program. But I rarely work in a single piece of software; rather, I usually focus on tasks that involve multiple applications. Roobasoft’s Concentrate is a bit like Think for tasks.

Concentrate lets you create Activities, which are groups of actions you want to occur together to help you concentrate on a particular task. An example activity is included, but you can create as many of your own as you need. For example, you may want a Creative Writing activity that quits any Internet and social-networking programs that are currently running, launches your favorite word-processing application, and changes your desktop to something that gets your creative juices flowing. Alternatively, you could keep your Web browser running but block access to Twitter, Facebook, and any other Web site that might tempt you to veer off the productive path.

When customizing an activity, you drag an action from the list on the left into Concentrate’s action area; you then configure that action. Available actions are:

• Launch Applications: one or more programs to be launched; you can also choose to hide all other running programs.
• Quit Applications: one or more programs to be quit.
• Open a Document: one or more documents to be opened.
• Open Websites: one or more Web sites to be opened.
• Block Websites: one or more Web sites to be blocked during the activity (requires admin access).
• Set Chat Status: instant-messaging status and messages to be set when the activity begins and ends.
• Change Desktop: a particular Desktop picture to be used during the activity.
• Run a Script: an AppleScript or Unix script to be run at the beginning or end of the activity.
• Play a Sound: a sound to be played at the beginning or end of the activity, or at particular times during the activity.
• Speak a Message: similar to Sound, but a message spoken using Mac OS X’s text-to-speech feature.
• Growl a Message: a Growl notification message to be displayed at the beginning or end of the activity, or at particular times during the activity.

Once you configure an activity, you can start or stop it from Concentrate’s main window, Dock menu, or systemwide menu. If you’ve set a time length for the activity, the activity will continue until the time is up; you’ll see a timer on the screen.

Concentrate works well, although there are a few improvements I’d like to see. For example, you can’t currently block the Desktop, hiding your clutter, as you can with Think. It can also be quite laborious to add Web sites and programs to an action. For the former, you must manually provide each URL; for the latter, you have to navigate to each application separately and you can’t drag and drop programs into the list. (Though if you frequently use a particular group of programs, or a particular set of Web sites, you can create groups that can be selected in these dialogs.) Finally, I’d like to see a way block all Web traffic and to schedule activities.

For future versions, the developer is working on the capability to block particular applications from launching, and a plug-in system so other developers can add actions.

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LittleSnapper shines at screenshot management

Mac OS X ships with a robust set of screenshot-taking capabilities. Not only can you take full-screen screenshots, but you can also capture individual interface elements (windows, menus, dialogs, and so on) or a selected area of the screen, or even take a timed snapshot. But if you make use of screenshots on a regular basis, you’ll likely find OS X’s built-in capabilities to be limiting. Realmac Software’s LittleSnapper picks up where the OS leaves off, giving you powerful tools to create better screenshots, arrange and archive them properly, and even upload them to the Web.

Besides allowing you to snap screenshots of the entire screen, individual application windows, and selected areas of the screen, LittleSnapper can also take timed screenshots and capture Web pages opened in Safari or in LittleSnapper’s built-in WebKit-based browser. You can access most of these functions using keyboard shortcuts or via a systemwide menu.

LittleSnapper’s slickly designed library window (shown in the image below) brings to mind iPhoto or iTunes. Each screenshot you take is automatically added to the library, where you can then proceed to rename, rate, tag, describe, and classify it. You can also import other images into the LittleSnapper library by dragging them onto the program’s Dock icon or into its window, or via the File -> Import Images command.

You can open and edit any image in the library using LittleSnapper’s editing tools; available actions include cropping, highlighting, blurring, and annotating. Edited images have a classy look to them, although I missed not having basic color-adjustment functionality like that provided by both iPhoto and Preview.

LittleSnapper shines when it comes to image management; the program provides a host of features for quickly finding images as your library grows. Basic categorization features allow you to define an image as a Desktop or iPhone screenshot, a Web page, a photograph, an illustration, a mockup, or an iSight capture. But you can also use tags, notes, ratings, and other features to create self-updating smart collections that work like smart folders in the Finder or smart playlists in iTunes. And a search filter lets you quickly search for a particular image.

You can also upload images directly to emberapp.com, LittleSnapper’s companion image-hosting and quasi-social-networking service. A free Ember account allows the uploading of up to thirty images per month, while the paid account ($24/year) allows unlimited uploads and includes free major-version upgrades for LittleSnapper.

I’ve been using LittleSnapper for a little over six months now, and though the earliest releases had some teething troubles, the program has become my de facto utility for taking and sharing screenshots. While there are a few minor features I would love to see added—Twitter integration, for starters—I’m pleased with the application on the whole. LittleSnapper’s user interface displays a level of finesse, found only in the best of Mac software, that makes the program a joy to use. At $35, it may not be suitable for casual users, but for those who make frequent use of screenshots, LittleSnapper packs a solid punch for the price.

Updated 9/17/2009, 2:43pm The original version of this review incorrectly stated that you could not import images via drag-and-drop. This has been corrected.

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SneakPeek Photo enhances Quick Look previews

I’m a huge fan of Mac OS X’s Quick Look feature, which lets you preview most types of documents by simply selecting a file and pressing the spacebar. I especially like that third-party developers can extend Quick Look’s functionality via plug-ins. I’ve previously covered several such plug-ins, but whereas most add support for more document types, Code Line Software’s SneakPeek Photo enhances Quick Look by providing more information about already supported images.

With SneakPeek Photo installed, Quick Look previews of most images include detailed information about the file as well as metadata provided by the digital camera that took the shot. Always visible at the top of the preview are the file name and type, size, f-stop, exposure time, ISO, focal length, and a mini histogram. But move your mouse cursor over the various icons to the right and you can view detailed data about the image, camera, and lens, as well as all EXIF tags.

If an image is geotagged, you can even view the location, on a world map, where the photo was taken, along with the exact coordinates of that location; click on the geotag button to view that location on Google Maps in your browser.

Finally, one of my favorite features is the capability to force Quick Look to show even larger previews of high-res images; these previews also include a loupe tool for enlarging the part of the image under the mouse cursor. The only drawback to this feature is that these larger, loupe-enhanced previews are slower to render than standard previews.

I encourage you to check out Code Line’s online interactive demo, as it’s far more compelling than the static image shown here.

SneakPeek Photo is a great enhancement to an already useful feature, and one that will appeal to both photographers who want a quick way to view detailed previews of their shots, and to aspiring photo bugs who are curious about the settings used to capture particular images. And because it’s enhancing Quick Look, you can use SneakPeek Photo on Mail attachments, in Open and Save dialogs—anywhere Quick Look works.

(Code Line Software also provides SneakPeek Pro, which provides advanced Quick Look previews of Illustrator, InDesign, Swatch Exchange, EPS, and Freehand documents.)

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Chill Pill brings RSS Fever to your desktop

Today's RSS-client market is dominated by NetNewsWire and Google Reader, in no small part because both are good and free. But folks on the lookout for a different—better, some say—experience have been checking out Fever, a self-hosted, Web-based reader with a flexible interface and a fresh approach to slicing through the Internet's thick jungle of news. Mac users now have another big reason to take a look: Chill Pill, a free desktop client for Fever.

(Some background on Fever: Fever costs $30 and is self-hosted, which means you need to have your own Web host that runs Apache, PHP, and MySQL, so it certainly isn't for everyone. Accessing Fever in your browser provides an interface with a list of feeds and groups folders on the left, and the main reading pane for headlines and articles on the right. One of Fever's key features is its Hot list that displays the "important" discussions occurring across your feeds. Each original piece of news is listed with a collection of articles related to that news. In other words, Fever does all the work to let you browse by topic. This feature and other organization options actually encourage you to subscribe to even more feeds and build your own personal, intelligent corner of the Web.)

On Chill Pill's initial run, it asks for your Fever URL. At first glance, the program doesn't seem to offer much more than if you'd created a Fever-specific browser with Fluid. Fortunately, Chill Pill has some cool tricks up its sleeve.

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Snow Leopard's (partial) Gem substitutes

One of the goals of Mac Gems is to find inexpensive software that makes Mac OS X even better—system tweaks and add-ons, productivity tools, and anything else that helps you get more out of your Mac. But as I’ve noted in the past, sometimes the features provided by third-party software are so useful that Apple decides they should be part of the OS itself. As a result, after every major new version of Mac OS X, I take a brief look at past Gems that are no longer necessary—or, at the very least, are less necessary for some people.

The good news for developers is that Snow Leopard focuses on under-the-hood changes, so it shouldn’t kill off so many third-party products. Still, I’ve come up with a good number of Gems, listed below, whose developers may be feeling a bit nervous these days. Next to each item’s name, I note whether the product’s features are fully replaced by Snow Leopard’s own, mostly replaced, or only partially so. Bonus: In comparing these Gems to Snow Leopard’s functionality, chances are you’ll learn about some of the new OS’s lesser-known features.

Cameras (mostly): In Leopard and earlier, many people disliked the OS X feature that automatically opened iPhoto, Aperture, or another program whenever they connected a digital camera or media card. However, for some people the problem was that they wanted to open different apps for different devices. Cameras offers just such a feature, letting you choose which programs handle which devices, and can automatically download photos. In Snow Leopard, Apple finally offers a similar feature: launch OS X’s Image Capture utility, connect a camera (or an iPhone or a memory card), and indicate which application should open the next time that device is connected. There’s even an option to launch AutoImporter.app, a utility that automatically downloads the photos on the connected device to a folder called AutoImport in your Pictures folder. Cameras is still more attractive—I really like the previews as images are downloaded—but most of its functionality is now available right in the OS.

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Promising Prospect: Read Right

As Macworld’s Gems columnist, I get many pitches from developers asking me to take a look at their software. Some of these products turn out to be great, while others…not so much. But it’s not always immediately clear which is which: every now and then there’s something that at first glance seems gimmicky, but turns out to be clever or useful.

That’s the case with Read Right, a PDF reader designed for laptops and other smaller screens. When you open a PDF in Read Right, the document is automatically rotated 90 degrees, scaled to fit the screen, and presented in full-screen mode—you rotate your laptop so you’re holding it like a book. The idea behind Read Right is that most current laptop screens use a widescreen aspect ratio, and most documents are taller than they are wide, so you’ll get the best reading experience—without all the up-and-down scrolling—if your PDFs are oriented to match your screen.

I didn’t think much of the idea initially; after all, if you’re open to reading documents sideways, Mac OS X's own Preview can rotate PDFs and lets you zoom documents to better fit a screen. But when I finally tried Read Right, I was pleasantly surprised. The auto-scale feature works well, the full-screen approach lets you focus on whatever you’re reading, and the overall feel is much more like reading a book than the standard way of reading PDFs on your MacBook’s screen. You can even invert the colors of the document for white-on-black reading, and you can navigate your document using keys, the trackpad button, or the trackpad itself.

Preview can approximate some of this functionality, but it requires tweaks and adjustments just to get started reading, and you don’t get the distraction-free full-screen mode or the color-inversion feature. In addition, Read Right remembers the specific zoom level, and which page you were last reading, for each PDF. (There’s a limitation to this feature, though: If you move or rename a document, Read Right forgets the settings for that file.)

Pressing Control+Space while in Read Right shows an onscreen display of navigation controls; for example, the up and down arrow keys—which are oriented horizontally when your laptop is rotated for reading—skip between pages, Return flips the document 180 degrees so you can choose if the "page" is on the left or right, and holding down the Option key while sliding two fingers across the trackpad (the “scroll” action) zooms in and out.

However, the initial version of Read Right has some bugs, most of them relating to the controls. Actions involving the trackpad’s scroll gesture—skimming through a document and custom zooming, for example—are frustratingly jumpy; sometimes nothing happens, while other times you zip forward 20 pages or you change the zoom level dramatically. The other issue I had, while testing Read Right on a MacBook Air, was that a number of the keyboard controls were different from what the on-screen help noted. For example, the program claims that the Space bar shows and hides the help screen, but for me it actually advanced the document to the next page (in my testing, Control+Space toggled the help screen).

Even with these issues, though, I enjoyed using Read Right, and I'm looking forward to future updates and improvements.

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