This Week's Sponsor:

Inoreader

Boost Productivity and Gain Insights with AI-Powered Intelligence Tools

Posts tagged with "mac"

iRip 2: The Best Way To Get Anything Out Of iOS Devices

The Little App Factory has published some great Mac apps in the past year. First for me came Evom, a simple and free utility that can save videos from the web (even Flash videos) and convert to a number of different devices, such as iPads or Apple TVs. Then I installed Rivet, another little utility for the Mac that can stream video from your local machine to a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 console in your local network. Works like magic.

Last week I took a look at The Little App Factory’s latest effort, Grappler for Mac. Grappler provides an integrated view to browse Youtube without leaving the app and download videos to convert for an iTunes-compatible format. It’s got a great UI, inline previews and a lot more. Make sure to check out my review here if you missed it. Read more

Want iOS Scrollbars On A Mac? There’s A Theme For That

In case you missed it at Apple’s Back to the Mac event, Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” is getting redesigned scrollbars and a brand new scrolling system. In fact, Apple is taking iOS’ “rubber banding” effect and minimal, fading scrollbars to the Mac with the next major iteration due next year. As demoed by Apple’s Craig Federighi in the Mac App Store app running on Lion, scrollbars will behave similarly to iOS – you won’t any scrollbar if you’re touching the trackpad. Read more

Add Twtmore Shortening To Tweetie for Mac

By default, Loren Brichter’s Tweetie for Mac comes with Twitlonger shortening capabilities. That means, if you have a tweet longer than 140 characters (it usually happens for long iOS / Android debates, or Apple’s events commentary) Tweetie will automatically post that tweet using Twitlonger – a service that puts a link in a tweet to read the entire message in the browser. It works pretty well, but it doesn’t look exactly great.

Twtmore is a service that’s been in closed beta for some months, until the developers opened up its APIs for everyone to use. It’s similar to Twitlonger, but it’s beautiful. This is a twtmore page, for instance. As you can see, it’s delicious. Tweetie Twtmore is a SIMBL plugin (yep, another one) that replaces the default Twitlonger shortening feature with twtmore.

To install Tweetie Twtmore, make sure that SIMBL is installed on your computer. You can go download SIMBL for free here. Once SIMBL is running correctly, download the Tweetie Twtmore bundle, extract it and place the file in /Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins or ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins if you want to install it for all user or just your account, respectively. Restart Tweetie for Mac.

The plugin works great even if Tweetie for Mac will keep saying “Post with Twitlonger”. As you can see in the screenshots below, long tweets will be forwarded correctly to twtmore. Go download the plugin here. Read more

Invaders Corruption Mutates Invaders With Geometry Wars

I like to hunt down different indie games that fulfill the ever growing desire to feast my eyes on well made, yet simple titles that are available on a variety of platforms so that even our Windows readers can take part in all the fun. But mostly I’m just looking for some casual pixel love for my midnight Mac gaming cravings. Last week I came across Invader Corruption, where a unique name creates an individual gaming experience so that no two games are quite the same. What starts off as a boring and possibly mundane shooter ends up being compelling and totally addictive. Shoot past the break to learn more about this frantic free title.

Read more

Top 5 OmniFocus Applescripts→

Top 5 OmniFocus Applescripts

The OmniFocus Extras forum on the Omnigroup user forum is one of the great sources for ready-to-use Applescripts. All you need to do is move them into the right directory on your machine and occasionally modify some of the scripts parameters to fit your needs.

The following AppleScript are those which are extremely handy and I use on a daily basis. There are many others available on the forum and other places, but many of them didn’t really add much value to my workflow, which is a pretty standard one, or solve problems I never encountered.

The “find project” one is a must-have.

Permalink

Alfred 0.8 Adds Clipboard Snippets, Inline Definitions

Here at MacStories, we’re big fans of Mac application launcher Alfred. I stopped using Apple’s Spotlight thanks to Alfred, and the app got a lot of better in the past months with clipboard history, improved keyboard navigation and several new features introduced in the paid version of the app, the Powerpack. For instance, I’m a huge fan of the iTunes Mini Player and the file system browser, which allow me to quickly start playing music from iTunes and browse in a Finder alternative view, respectively. Most of all, I like Alfred because it’s lightweight, blazing fast and entirely keyboard-based. Not to mention that the developers are coming out with updated every few weeks or so. I love it.

The latest Alfred update, version 0.8, brings lots of general improvements and bug fixes (check them out below) and a couple of new features that are very welcome in my workflow. Alfred can now save test snippets in its clipboard interface: say you have these recurring lines of text you find yourself typing on a daily bases (email addresses, templates, links), you can save them as snippets in Alfred’s preferences and paste them anywhere with a keyboard command. I type “snip” to open the snippet interface, then “keys” and there my snippet with unicode characters goes into the text field my cursor is on. Takes seconds and it just works.

Other new features include inline dictionary definitions, possibility to open recent documents and eject drives with just a few keystrokes. Great stuff for the keyboard geek. In case you still haven’t tried it, Alfred is available for free here.

Full changelog below. Read more

Apple Offering Free iOS Development iBooks

If you’re a Mac or iOS developer and happen to have an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad running the iBooks app, go open the iBookstore and search for “apple developer”. As you can see, Apple is offering iOS / Mac development iBooks completely for free.

The six books, published by Apple Developer Publications, include “iOS Technology Overview”, “Cocoa Fundamentals Guide” and the popular “iOS Human Interface Guidelines”. Some books report a release date of “November 2010”, but Apple is making sure you’re running the latest iBooks version by writing in each description “This book displays best with iBooks 1.2 or later”.

Indeed the books are elegant and come with a lot of detailed graphics and screenshots. Sure they’re not illustrated books (supported in iBooks 1.2), but I can see why Apple is recommending the latest version of their ebook reading software. Read more