Keypoint Winners Announced

Thanks everyone who entered the Keypoint giveaway. We’d like to thank Bert Timmermans for the promo codes he gave to MacStories.

Here are the winners:

Martin Král

William Bithrey

Olìve

Doob

You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few hours. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.

In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet.

And also, be sure to check out our teaser page for the MacStories:Next project. Something magical is coming soon.

Manage Geo Tagged Photos with TravelPad. Review and Giveaway.

If you have an iPhone and you’re not a professional photographer or, at least, you don’t don’t have a pro camera, then I guess you shot a lot of pictures with it. And it’s not that the iPhone keeps you away from shooting pics: good built in camera aside, there are hundreds of photography applications in the App Store and most of them are excellent pieces of software that can power up the iPhone with tons (really, tons) of additional features.

TravelPad is a new application from Counterwinds which allows you to collect and organize your photos in albums using geo location. We’re gonna take a look at it, and - guess what - we’ve got some promo codes to give away.

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Webkit + Eye Tracking: Gaze Controlled Tabs

We all know Webkit is a fantastic engine, just as we all appreciate its 3D capabilities and css transforms effects when we see a well implemented one. But when I thought I had seen everything Webkit could offer (or at least a good part), there I stumbled upon this article on HplusMagazine, describing the Text 2.0 project, an enhanced reading experience that combines (or should, at last) eye tracking, neat javascript and CSS tricks to create a brand new, revolutionary way of reading web content.

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Snippets, Code Library of Choice. Review and Giveaway.

I’m not a web designer by any means, but simply someone who is interested in the beauty of code. Being a big fan of HTML and CSS, I decided to learn a thing or two when I decided to craft my own WordPress blog. It’s not particularly fancy or make use of any cool CCS3 effects like Mike Matas’ new site, but it’s a step. I’m not at the point yet where I can drill out code or figure some (okay most) things off the top of my head, so I often reference a lot of code that I reuse or edit for my own purposes. I learn a lot through the myriads of tutorials that are available online. All of this eventually leads to Snippets, which I love to death. Finally, instead of having to reference bookmarks shoved into a desktop folder, I can store and save code in a beautiful desktop library that makes acquiring code incredibly easy to do.

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My Backup Workflow

You’ve probably read John Gruber’s post about backups last week, the one where he talked about his experience with a damaged internal hard drive and, luckily for him, the way he managed to save data with Dropbox, Super Duper, Disk Warrior and a couple of external hard disks.

I think John made some strong points in suggesting to purchase not one, but a couple of external hard drives - as you really don’t know when a hard drive is gonna fail. Just as an internal drive can die, so a Firewire one with all your backups can.

Anyway, there are some other practices I’ve gotten used to follow over time I’d like to talk about.

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MacKeeper, A New Take on System Care

Though many people say you don’t need to do any kind of maintenance on Mac OS X, I’ve gotten used to run a couple of applications every two weeks or so to keep my Mac clean and healthy. Mac OS X is a great platform, but this doesn’t mean it can’t become slower over time, especially because of caches, logs and undeleted preferences. Did you know that when you trash an application, it leaves many stuff behind it and that if you don’t use a dedicated app uninstaller (like AppZapper) that stuff will remain there for good? Imagine that stuff being a bunch of 200MB cache folders and you get the idea. This applies for caches, system logs, binaries, unused language files.

Fortunately, there are some apps that enable you to perform maintenance tasks thus deleting that unused space, and I think CleanMyMac from MacPaw (which we previously reviewed here) is the leading app, powered by a great UI and a large set of features. Today I’ll take a look at the new kid on the block, MacKeeper, which aims at keeping your Mac healthy and clean, but comes with other additional functionalities that could really make it stand out from the crowd.

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