Giles Turnbull - page 23

The name might not be giving too much away, but Coconut Battery should be installed on everyone’s notebook Mac. If it were called “Free Battery Health App”, it would do exactly what it said on the tin.

It shows you, with numbers and helpful colored charts, exactly what condition your notebook battery is in. It shows in an instant the current charge, and how much more you can charge it if you try; and more usefully, it shows the original capacity of your battery, and its capacity right now.

If you click the little disclosure triangle at the top right, you can save the current data for future reference. Keep saving snapshots at regular intervals, and you’ll be able to see at a glance how your battery is slowly degrading. Because that’s what happens, folks: over time, everso slowly and gradually, the battery in your Air or your Pro or your plain old MacBook is going to decline. As time goes on, its capacity to hold charge will decrease until the time comes to replace it. This is inevitable, I’m afraid, just like the death of your hard disk. It’s one of those things you need to plan for; and Coconut Battery is one of those apps that helps with that.

(You’re reading the 19th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)

TextExpander turns short text snippets into longer ones, saving you a great deal of time if you spend a lot of time in front of a keyboard.

You define your own snippets, and the shortcuts you’ll use to trigger them. Every time you type the trigger, the snippet takes its place instantly.

On a Mac, the green “Maximise” button (found alongside the yellow “Minimise” button and the red “Close” button in the top-left corner of every window) doesn’t do what you’re used to its counterpart doing on a Windows PC.

In current versions of OS X, “Maximise” really means “display the contents of this window in the most efficient way possible,” – and different applications will interpret that in different ways, and in different circumstances. The results can be frustratingly unpredictable, especially for newcomers who aren’t used to a Mac.

Magic Launch is an OS X application that attempts to solve the creator codes problem that was introduced with Snow Leopard (see our original coverage here.

The issue didn’t affect everyone, only people who work with certain files in a variety of different applications.

Paul Riegler at the Executive Road Warrior blog wrote an interesting piece about what made him switch from an iPad to a new MacBook Air.

In short: the iPad was a nice portable computer, but the Air is better. It offers more flexibility and freedom. The iPad was a good solution but bulky (because Riegler was toting a keyboard for it too), and sometimes – not often – he found himself wishing for a plain old USB port, or the chance to see something in Flash.

Time Sink is a new tool from Many Tricks, who also make cool things like Butler and Witch.

Time Sink monitors how you use your Mac – which applications you use, and how long you use them for. It collates and aggregates this data over time, displaying it an attractive chart.

This is one of those simple little things that’s so obvious, and so simple, that it’s easy for newcomers to miss.

How do you rename a file on a Mac? If you’re coming from Windows, you’ll be accustomed to right-clicking on it and choosing the “Rename” menu item, but it’s not there on OS X.

This little lot (22 Macs, 2 PCs) belongs to London-based 21-year-old student Brent (who declined to give us his surname). It’s one of the latest pics in his Mactastic Flickr stream which is jam packed with Macs, iPods and iPads. Only some of them are pictured in use as doorstops.

Brent says: “You can put it down to just not having time to sell the older models every time I upgrade. As a result of this, I’ve gained a collection.”

His current working machines are a 27″ iMac and a MacBook Pro. He’s not got one of the new Airs yet but I’m pretty sure he’ll have one soon…

Here’s Devonthink To Go for iPad and iPhone, and it has a lot to offer.

For starters, there’s two-way sync between desktop and mobile databases. Documents that have been edited in other apps can be “opened back” in Devonthink, which will update its database accordingly. And plain text files can be edited inside Devonthink To Go itself.

There are some people who simply don’t care what their computer is doing in the background; and there are others who can’t live without that kind of information.

For that second group of people, iStat Menus is a no-brainer.

We’ve mentioned the IDAPT charging station before, but it has just been updated in a variety of colors in time for the Christmas season.

If, like a lot of us here at the Cult, you have more devices than you know what to do with and not enough time (or power outlets) to charge them all, a single charging station might come in useful.

And if it’s going to be so prominent in your home, you might as well get one that fits in with your decor.

The IDAPT i4 claims to charge over 4000 different gadgets, either via adaptors for the base unit or via USB connection to it. It will charge your iPods, iPhones and iPads quite happily – and all at once. It costs $59.99 including a pack of six mixed adaptors, or you can choose to pick your own selection of four adaptors that precisely match your devices.

The kids have spoken. They don’t want toys for Christmas. They don’t want candy. They don’t want games or CDs or DVDs.

They want iDevices.

Photo effects apps are two-a-penny on the App Store now, so if your photography app is going to make a splash it needs to offer something more than just whimsical visual effects and a selection of fake-Polaroid borders.

Pinhole Camera claims to turn your iPhone into a digital pinhole camera. It’s quite fun to use, mocked up like a home-made pinhole cam made of sticky tape and cardboard.

But what sets it apart isn’t the basic photos – it’s the double exposure feature that lets you merge two photos into one.

If you’ve not discovered Trainyard yet, it’s high time you got yourself to the App Store and spent a dollar on it. It’s one of those games that offers a great deal of entertainment for a very low price.

Yesterday we posted some first impressions of the Mac App Store by a list of some of the finest software developers around. Overnight we’ve had more responses from more superb developers, so here for your reading pleasure are their initial thoughts about the Store and what it means for their business.

Overall the mood is positive, but uncertain. There are still many questions to be answered. Almost all the devs we’ve spoken to are keen to get started, but not quite sure yet how they’re going to make it all come together.

(And to all the developers who took part, providing comment for this post and yesterday’s, Cult of Mac would like to say a big, big thank you. You people rock.)

So now we know that OS X 10.7 Lion will be released next summer, and that many of its features will be based on the loop of feedback Steve Jobs described: the Mac influenced the iPhone, which influenced the iPad, which is now influencing the Mac once more.

Or to put it another way: expect lots of iOS-style controls, widgets and designs in Lion.

If you looked closely at the demos in yesterday’s presentation, you might have noticed one or two little details that offer hints of what’s to come.

This bit from yesterday’s event made me laugh out loud.

This was about 30 minutes in, and Randy Ubillos was showing us the new iMovie ’11 and its built-in trailers. Impressive movie soundtrack music blared out.

Randy turned to the crowd and said: “For the music, we went to London, to Abbey Road studios, and made original recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra.”

He dropped that in so casually, but just think about it for a moment.

For the sound effects used in one feature, in one application that lives inside a larger suite of media apps, Apple hired an orchestra, a conductor, a composer, Abbey Road studios, and all the paraphernalia that must have come with them. Caterers, hotels, management, hangers-on, producers, heaven knows who and what else.

That’s what you do when you have $50bn in the bank.

So this is what happens when you open FaceTime on your Mac, use it to call FaceTime on your iPhone, and then point the camera on one towards the camera on the other: infinite FaceTime!

Coming soon: infinite FaceTime inside infinite screensharing. Go on, I dare you.

This dream is collapsing. As long as we’ve got the timings right, we can ride the wake-ups all the way back to the real world.

So there’s going to be an App Store for the Mac, just like the App Store we’re all used to on iOS.

What do OS X developers think of this?

I got in touch with a bunch of devs to ask them what they make of it. Many of them are still reading through the official documentation, and some of the questions they ask below may well be answered there. But here are some of their very first impressions…

If you’ve ever spent any time exploring the world of OS X notebook applications, you’ll have bumped up against Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox, without doubt one of the most powerful of them all.

It’s also one of the most expensive, and the one that polarises opinion most often. Tinderbox fans simply love the advanced features it comes with; critics point to the difficulty newcomers will have in getting to grips with them.

So, enter stage right: Twig, which although I’ve thought long and hard for a better term, is perhaps best described as “Tinderbox lite”. So what is it, exactly?

For those of us of a certain age, there’s an almost physical tug at the heartstrings when we see the distinctive Pacman profile. So if you like the thought of your MacBook’s lit-up Apple logo as a Pacman power pill, this decal by LastFuse should be on your Christmas “just-a-little-treat-for-myself” list. You can buy it in black or white from this Etsy store – be quick now, I have a feeling these will disappear fast.

Yojimbo users, here’s the news you’ve been waiting for.

Yojimbo 3.0 is out today, and with it comes a companion iPad application that lets you take your Yojimbo database to go.

You’ve always wanted to paint your face up like a singer at the Beijing opera, right?

No? You sure?

This is the RM Slate, an 11.6 inch multitouch tablet running Windows 7, priced at £399 (about $630).

Exposé is an OS X feature designed to help you move around many documents and applications quickly and easily.

All you have to do is push a button (or move your mouse in a particular way, or drag your fingers on the trackpad), and all your open windows, from all your open applications, will be displayed on screen at once, shrunk down so that you can see them all.