Imagine the entire Internet as your screen saver. That’s WebSaver, a SandwichLab utility designed to bring you the best of the Internet right to your dormant Mac computer. If you’ve ever wanted The Numa Numa Guy as your desktop background, we’ll here’s your chance. Just don’t let the Star Wars Kid know.
Posts in reviews
WebSaver, A Universal Web Display
Reconsidering Dropzone
Dropzone is an application by Aptonic which I reviewed back in November here, and it was quite a positive review. I was impressed by the app, which was (is) a small utility that sits in the dock and enables you to perform many actions by simply activating them via drag & drop. Want to share a link? Drag it from Safari onto the Dropzone icon and boom, it shortens the URL using bit.ly and it automatically places it in the clipboard. With this same process you can install applications by dragging the original .dmg file, mount and unmount external hard drives, set desktop pictures and more. It’s extensible, it’s magical.
DestroyTwitter, unMac your Client
When people think of Twitter clients on the Mac, we immediately associate with clients wrapped in the fuzzy warm blanket of Cocoa. Sometimes these clients appear as HUDs that nestle in the menubar. Professionals might turn to the popular Adobe Air client Tweetdeck to keep track of trends and various search terms. Many of us would be lifeless without Tweetie, but before we finally sink our teeth into the latest MacHeist offering, I’m going to DestroyTwitter.
Scrup, Free and Open Source Alternative to Tinygrab and Droplr
Sharing picture across the internet could be a real problem sometimes. Not because there’s a lack of tools to do it, no - that is the real problem: there are too many apps that enable you to take a screenshot and upload it somewhere, and people don’t know anymore which app to use. We reviewed apps such as Tinygrab and Droplr before, but the one we’re talking about today is quite awesome and surely different from those ones.
Scrup by Rasmus Andersson (designer at Spotify) is simple and open source utility that, once installed and running on your Mac, can upload screenshots to your own webserver and automatically paste the url into the clipboard for easy sharing. You just have to upload a .php file to your server, insert some credentials in the Preferences of the app and you’ll be all set. Scrup runs in the menubar, it shows nice thumbnail previews of your “scrups” together with date and time.
It works just as good as many other paid and famous apps. Scrup is free and available over at GitHub’s official project page here. Also, be sure to check out Django Scrup, a django-based web receiver for Scrup that forwards the screenshots to Amazon S3.
Put Core Location to use with NetworkLocation
One feature that people are often unaware of in their Macs is something called Core Location. Core Location is what automatically sets the time zones on your Mac for you when traveling around the world by looking for nearby WiFi hotspots and gathering local intel. In conjunction with Google Maps and NetworkLocation, you can establish rules that aid in automatically performing tasks when you reach your daily destinations.
Save Your Notes in the Menubar with QuickNote
Whether you want to jot down a quick note for yourself or save some information from the web, Mac OS X doesn’t offer a default solution for this. Well, you could leave TextEdit running all the time and create a new document everytime but that’s a low process that is likely to end up with dozens of files on your hard drive. Or, you could use Yojimbo to capture anything you want and that sounds reasonably good. But you agree with me that there must be a better way to store quick notes.
QuickNote is a new app from Snarbsoft, designed by Laurent Baumann, which runs in the menubar and allows you to easily capture text notes.
CoGe, Quartz Composer Powered VJ Application
“CoGe is a free, open-source, semi-modular Quartz Composer powered VJ Application for Mac OSX with a solid, minimalistic look and feel. It’s an unconventional application, because has not built-in media handle feauters or effects. With the excellent Quartz Composer support, you can build your own media handlers, effects, mixer and automatization modules.”
Quiet Read Goes Pro, Adds Instapaper and Read It Later Support
Quiet Read, the application from Bambooapps that lets you quickly save links for later by simply dragging them onto a menubar icon, has been updated and now comes in both a free and Pro version.
Harmony, HTML5 Procedural Drawing Tool
Harmony is an HTML5-based online tool that lets you draw on a white canvas using different brushes. It’s nothing more than an experiment but it’s great nevertheless. It supports a very basic multiply blending effect (as seen in Photoshop) and the developer says it’s very first attempt to reproduce the functionalities of a drawing application after playing with the <canvas> element for some weeks.
Also, it works best on Webkit as Firefox and Opera don’t support context.globalCompositeOperation = ‘darker’. You can save images to .png format.
An experiment, but after seeing Sketchpad weeks ago, we can’t deny that the future of webapps is very bright and promising.