Moving content around on the Mac can be incredibly easy or slightly annoying. Growing up on Windows, I’ve lived with the luxury of cutting documents before pasting them in the desired locations. Quite honestly, that’s still my preferred method of moving documents. By default, that’s absent on the Mac. And to be frank, I’ve never liked how the Mac has dealt with files and folders at all. This may seem absurd, but hear me out: To take a file from my documents, and move it into a folder hierarchy buried somewhere on my system (perhaps deeper in my documents), I either have to copy the folder then delete the original, or drag and drop. Copying, pasting, then deleting the original is a terrible way to go about things unless you’re working with text. Dragging and dropping can work okay, but it gets old when you have to go maybe five folders deep. There is no other absolute move command which cut solved.

The second problem with computers in general is screen real estate. On my laptop, every pixel counts. Dragging and dropping is made easier when you have two finder windows open, but again, it gets old having to resize windows each time. If you’re like me and you still haven’t moved to a third party application to manage your files and folders, then Fiwi can help solve the drag and drop dilemma.

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I have a late 2008 Macbook Pro, and one could argue that maybe it’s time for me to consider an upgrade to a new model. Maybe with some SSD and new processor goodness. I think that my machine is still a great one though, with its 4GB of RAM and a pretty capable hard disk: it’s been able to do so many things for me in these two years that I don’t see it being replaced anytime soon, actually. But, I think that’s a given that I should keep an eye on its internal stats: you know, stuff like the battery health, CPU usage over time and memory consumption.

I’ve always done that with the iStat Pro dashboard widget from Bjango (former iSlayer), but last night I decided to upgrade to iStat Menus 3. Here’s why you should do the same.

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The Mac draws a lot of attention from bloggers who love to create and share content. Great tools like Skitch, Little Snapper, SnapIt, Camtasia Studio, and Screenflow enable us to capture content as it appears on the screen, edit it, format it, and ship it across the Interwebs effortlessly. Separately, these tools are awesome in their own rights. Together, it’s possible to have a super app. Voila (version 3.0) for the Mac takes a little of everything from these mastered tools, and brings them together into a one stop shop that should hopefully attend to all your needs. How do we feel about it? Read past the break to find out.

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Floating between contacts in GMail and maintaining a carbon copy of those recently added contacts on my Mac has become somewhat of an evening chore. Believe me, manually adding the same contacts to multiple devices over and over again bites. But with Syncman, it’s easy to keep your GMail and Address Book in sync nirvana. Read more

There are two kinds of desktop applications: those that work and require you to pay attention to them, and those that work and you don’t even notice them.

I have many applications on my Mac, many of them for reviewing purposes, but I tend to keep a very few in the dock and some running in the menubar. Of all these applications I have most of them belong to the first category, they are apps that require me to look at them and perform actions basing on their user interface. 1Password needs me to input some letters in a text field to unlock its database, and Cyberduck wants me to select the proper folder to upload pictures. My action is needed, always and immediately. Without my action, these applications are lost like an empty car. I have to drive them to go somewhere (working with them), but I also had to learn driving them in the past to get used to their system.

Then there are applications that live quietly in the background, do their job without requiring my attention and are there when I need them. From a technology standpoint, they’re not that different. I use these “quiet” apps just like I use the other ones. But from a user point of view, there’s an immensely huge advantage when using the quiet apps: even if you actually use them, you don’t notice them. So I guess that their biggest feature is that of melting with the OS and become an invisible layer of your workflow.

Clipmenu is an application I’ve been using for many years now and, just like the Finder or Mail, is an application I’m highly dependent on, mainly because it’s become so well integrated with the OS that I don’t even notice using it anymore. Any Mac that doesn’t have Clipmenu installed doesn’t feel like a real Mac to me.

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I woke up last Monday, belly first, arm hanging over the side of the bed as the alarm chimed. It was quite early, 6:30 to be exact. I kind of tossed and turned for a bit before lumping the sheets off to one side and planting my feet solidly on terra firma. Yup, I was awake.

A quick banana and glass of milk later, I started my leg stretches, making sure to pay special attention to my quadriceps. With a little jig and a tap of my iPod, I headed out my door on what was a relatively crisp, cool morning. Five minutes later, and I was off running. Literally. Read more

A few days ago I was reading a post on Alexander Limi’s blog called “Improving download behaviors in web browsers”, and from that deep and informative analysis I realized how much Safari’s download management is indeed flawed and could be seriously improved. Now that I think about it, I download a lot of stuff everyday (be it the screenshots Cody sends for our posts, or archives with new icons I want to try out) and I regularly have to a) hide the download window because I can’t stand it and gets in my way and b) clear my download list who easily gets cluttered with all the files I’ve previously downloaded.

As Limi also pointed out in his post, managing downloads in a browser could be a lot better. It should be a lot better, and hopefully we’ll see some new features implemented in the next iterations of Safari and Firefox. But at the moment of writing this, the only solution seems to install a dedicated download manager app, and that’s why today I’m taking a look at Leech by Many Tricks, which has just been updated to the 2.0 version.

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Radium is one of those apps I fell instantly in love with. So much in fact, it’s gotten me interested in Internet radio again. While I’ve checked out applications like Snowtape and Radio Gaga, I didn’t want the recording features. That sounds crazy, but I don’t want to manage another library or window of “stuff.” And that’s the problem I have with things like Pandora or Last.fm too: I need a dedicated browser window, widget, or fat application just to stream an hour’s worth of alternative music. So when I was contacted about Radium, I was skeptical, but optimistic. Five minutes after using it, I was sold. It’s perfect for me. Read more

We’re always looking for new apps. We’re always looking forward to that new app which should revolutionize the way we work. Apply this statement to file sharing (a way too crowded market on Mac OS X) and you’ll see thousands of people eagerly talking about Droplr, Tinygrab, whatever. There are at least 20 similar file sharing apps that I know, and while some of them are really good pieces of software, most of them are crap, period.

I think it’s impossible to review Cloud app by Linebreak without mentioning the fact that these guys managed to build a tremendous hype around their first mainstream application: back when Cloud was nothing but an icon, I remember everyone was talking about this new app which had a great looking icon and was every Mac user’s wet dream. Nice, we all started following the Twitter account. Cloud was then released as ultra-closed beta, and a few designers had the chance to put their hands on it and tease us on Twitter about how awesome it was. Again, we bookmarked a Twitter search for the terms “Cloud Mac”. Last, Linebreak opened even more spots for the beta, and we reviewed an early version of Cloud. It impressed us. It was easy to use, fast, useful, customizable, definitely Mac-like. But still, it wasn’t finished. Hell no, it needed more work, more refinements, more features, new servers - whatever it takes to be the champion.

To stand out from the crowd of file sharing apps.

Now, Cloud has finally gone public. And it’s way better than before.

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