Giles Turnbull - page 25

PlainText is the latest text app from Hog Bay Software‘s Jesse Grosjean.

Jesse, as many of you will know, is the genius behind several other apps for iOS and the desktop, including WriteRoom and TaskPaper.

PlainText is very similar to, but not exactly the same as, another of his apps called SimpleText. Where SimpleText was built to sync with a home-made service called simpletext.ws, PlainText has been built from scratch to sync with Dropbox.

PlainText is a simple text writing tool for iPhone and iPad. It will sync with Dropbox, and includes support for TextExpander snippets if you use them. It’s free, supported by adverts. If you want to switch them off, you can for a one-off payment of $4.99.

Long time readers of Cult of Mac may remember a series we carried a year or so ago, under the title WTF App Of The Week.

We’ve not had any of those apps for a while now, but I saw something today that made me reach for the old WTF-ometer, because this most certainly qualifies.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Poo Log HD. Readers of a squeamish disposition may wish to stop reading right here.

Secrets is a preference pane rather than an app, so once you’ve installed it, you’ll find it inside System Preferences, not in your Applications folder.

What is it? Think of it as “System Preferences Plus”. Secrets gives you point-and-click access to hundreds of hidden preferences in OS X and many applications. Without Secrets, the only way of changing these settings is by using a Terminal window and typing stuff like “defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE” (which is the secret setting for hiding the Ping drop-down menu in iTunes.)

So if you’d rather avoid having to mess around with geekery like that, Secrets is your friend. You can browse through all the hidden preferences on your system, or filter them by application. So if you want Mail to always display messages in plain text, or if you want Safari’s tab bar to stay in view even when there’s only one tab open, or if you want to change how often Time Machine does its backups – well, you can change all of those, and loads more, inside Secrets.

It’s free to download, and frequently updated with new items as and when Apple and third party developers push out updates to software packages.

At the top of many OS X applications you’ll see something like this:

…a row of buttons, known as the Toolbar. This particular Toolbar is from word processing application Bean; different apps will have different buttons and different toolbars, but they will all look something like this.

The point is, wherever you see a Toolbar like this, you can customize it to suit your needs. You can put more buttons up there, or have just one or two. Or none at all.

Here’s how you do it.

The Observer’s John Naughton wrote an interesting piece for this weekend’s paper arguing a point that many of us would raise our hands and agree with: iTunes is bloated beyond belief, and Apple needs to do something about it.

Naughton points out that iTunes is at the center of the new Apple empire. Apple’s success depends largely on iDevices, and iDevices tend to get plugged into computers. And when that happens, they need iTunes to hold their hand.

The problem is that iTunes has become less than the sum of its parts. Weighed down by the multitude of tasks it has been assigned, iTunes has become slow, unwieldy, and confusing.

If you’ve updated iTunes to 10.0.1 in the last day or so, you might have noticed that Ping is pushing itself in your face rather more forcefully than before.

One thing: there’s the Ping sidebar on the right. Another: there’s a new Ping drop-down menu that appears in your music library, alongside any song you have selected.

They’re fine if you use Ping, but if you don’t, you might want to get rid of them. The sidebar is easy to deal with, you can hide it with a click. But the drop-down menu requires a little more tinkering to get rid of.

I like this photo gallery that Apple has put together to plug the power of the iPad as used by archaeologists at Pompeii.

You’d think, looking at the shiny iPads on their smart wooden desks in the Apple Store, that using one inside a muddy pit would be a terrible idea.

But it seems that as long as they’re wrapped in a decent case, they serve as excellent outdoor computers. The lack of moving parts means fewer chances for dirt to get inside, and the lack of keyboard means you can use the muckiest of fingers and still get your data entered without a problem.

Also of interest is the selection of applications used by real archaeologists in the field. FM Touch for mobile Filemaker databases, iDraw and OmniGraffle for sketching out discoveries and charts.

The guy in charge of the dig believes he’s already saved a year’s worth of data entry time. And this quote says it all: “A generation ago computers made it possible for scholars to move away from just looking at pretty pictures on walls and work with massive amounts of information and data. It was a huge leap forward. Using iPad to conduct our excavations is the next one.”

Windows users are accustomed to a “Print Screen” or “PrntScrn” button on their keyboard. When hit, the computer takes a picture of the current screen and saves it to the clipboard, ready for pasting into a graphics program.

So where’s the PrntScrn button on a Mac? How do you take a screenshot?

Vance L from Australia contacted us at [email protected] saying that when he switched from PC to Mac, he spent 10 minutes looking for that button before realising it wasn’t there. But as he found out, there’s another way.

You know me, you know I love my iPhone photography toys. One of my favorites is QuadCamera, which I last mentioned here back in 2009.

The app has undergone a steady series of updates since then, but the latest adds support for both of the iPhone 4’s cameras. Now you can take multi-shot photos of yourself, or of anything you might wish to hold above the iPhone 4 while it’s lying face-up on a table. I decided to spare you the horror of my own unshaven, sleep-deprived, stress-ridden visage in favour of some shots of my MBP, but I’m sure you get the idea. There’s always Flickr.

(If you’ve upgraded to iOS 4.1, make sure you check for and install the very latest QuadCamera update, otherwise you’ll encounter a bug that prevents the app launching.)

Many other photo apps have come and gone, but QuadCamera is one of the small handful that’s remained on my iPhone ever since I bought it. It’s quick and it’s fun, and well worth dropping a couple of bucks on.

If you’re using iTunes and you have a lot of music, it’s not that easy to browse through many hundreds of albums and select one to listen to.

For those of us who still like to listen to entire albums, there are ways to pluck one album at random from your library and get iTunes to play it.

The first is to grab this script from Doug’s AppleScripts. It will do the job perfectly well.

The second, and my new favorite way, is to use the optional Powerpack add-on to Alfred and the “Random Album” command you’ll find there (see screenshot above).

I’m enjoying using this because it’s very quick and simple. Alfred has to create its own iTunes playlist, which gets instantly re-populated with a new album’s worth of tracks every time you activate the command – which, since you’re using Alfred, only takes a couple of keystrokes.

[xrr rating=80%]

Adobe has announced the release of new video and photo editing packages.

Photoshop Elements is upgraded to version 9, and its video editing cousin Premiere Elements 9 is released as an OS X application for the first time.

Separately, they will cost you $99 each, or you can buy them both together for $149.

What do you get for your money? Well in Photoshop Elements, Adobe promises some off-shoots of the Content Aware Fill feature found in Photoshop, making it easy to edit and repair photos and have the gaps filled in realistically and automatically. The Organizer feature and Auto-Analyzer are designed to make managing large image collections easy, and there’s new face recognition technology.

Elements users might like to check out the official Facebook pages where Adobe is posting lots of tips and how-tos.

In Premiere Elements, you’ll find the same Organizer alongside tools for image stabilization and color correction.

Both applications offer access to Adobe Plus, an online backup and storage service that gives you 20GB of space for $50/year.

We all like our eyes. What a shame we subject them to such an endless onslaught of photons from computer screens all day long.

F.lux is an app designed to make your eyes feel a little more comfortable while working on a computer.

Most of us don’t need VoiceOver, the accessibility feature that’s built into the operating system of each and every iPhone.

But for one blind iPhone owner, it has been a life-changer.

Today’s Best Thing Ever is also my favorite new appquisition of the week, and it’s called the Accidental News Explorer, and it was built by Brendan Dawes

It’s news, but not as we know it. For a start, there’s no list of headlines. Just a search box.

Look at this button in the top-right corner of a Finder window. Ever wondered what this is for?

It’s called the “toolbar control button” and you’ll see it all over the place in OS X. It lives in the top-right corner of an application or document window.

But what does it do? Simple: it hides the toolbar from view. The toolbar is that strip across the top of the window where buttons and controls live. You can choose to leave it there all the time, or you can reclaim that screen space by getting it out of sight. That’s what this button is for.

Let’s look at an example.

If you’re a DevonThink user and an iPad owner, here’s some good news: the forthcoming DevonThink To Go app will let you take entire DT databases with you.

Just as you can with the desktop application, it’s possible to add notes into each database’s inbox while you’re out and about, and sort and categorize them later. Everything gets synced to your computer over a local wifi network when it suits you.

Although intended as a companion for the desktop, there’s no reason why you can’t use DevonThink To Go as a standalone iPad notebook and document storage box.

For a better idea of what’s to come, check out the screenshots gallery.

Those clever people at London creative agency BERG have produced yet another amazing thing – a film called Making Future Magic, in collaboration with another agency, Dentsu.

What’s amazing is the innovative technique they used to animate the frames in the film. They programmed an iPad to display slices through each image they wanted to project, then dragged the iPad through the air as it displayed each slice.

OmmWriter, the curious word processor that we first mentioned here back in November 2009, has just been updated with a new version, OmmWriter Dana.

OmmWriter is different from other writing apps. It sees writing as a completely immersive activity, and tries to provide the writer with an environment worth getting immersed in. Not just full screen text, but also attractive background images, and soothing ambient sounds.

You either love it or you hate it. Some Cult readers loved it so much they voted it as one of the best new applications of last year.

You don’t.

There’s no need to. The OS X filesystem is designed to look after files properly in the first place, so that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – you might hear your computer’s hard disk whirring for no apparent reason. Among other things, that could be the system looking after itself – moving stuff around on the disk so that there’s no need for you to actually sit down and click a button marked “defrag.”

If you want to know more about the technical ins-and-outs behind this, go read this Apple support document. As it points out, there’s no need to defrag your disk, and even if you download a third party defragging application and run it, you probably won’t notice any difference.

Save yourself the trouble, and spend your not-defragging time doing something fun on your computer instead.

(You’re reading the 28th post in our series, 100 Essential Mac Tips And Tricks For Windows Switchers. These posts explain to OS X beginners some of the most basic and fundamental concepts of using a Mac. Find out more.)

If you work with multiple monitors, the following scenario might strike a chord: you’re busy working on a document in a secondary monitor, and you need to apply some software widget to the stuff you’ve just selected. You struggle to remember the keyboard shortcut but can’t; so you have to use the Menu Bar.

Problem is, the Menu Bar is back where your computer left it, on your primary monitor. Once in a while this might not be a problem, but if it’s a common occurrence in your workflow, it’s going to start getting irritating.

Binary Bakery’s MenuEverywhere is an application designed to solve this problem.

Here’s Sony’s latest attempt to get you to part with some dollars in exchange for something to plug your iPod into.

The RDP-X50iP is a speaker dock for iPod & iPhone that boasts 20W + 20W RMS, or what Sony likes to call “room-filling power.”

Weirdly, the press release we got sent makes specific mention of it supporting iPhone 3G and 3GS, but goes out of its way to not mention the iPhone 4. So we’re not betting that it’s officially supported; your milage may etc etc.

It weighs just under 4lbs and is about 14 inches from end to end. Amazon is selling it for $166, which strikes me as quite a lot for a speaker dock. At that price, the sound had better fill a room, and really well.

QuickLook is a system for quickly previewing files as you browse around your computer. It’s really easy to use, and personally I find it invaluable. Not a day goes by when I don’t use it at least once.

Swimmers of Britain, stock up on small change! You’re going to need it to pay for a locker to put your iPhone into every time you go to the pool.

And why will you be taking your iPhone to the pool? Because, damp exercise addicts, you’ll have installed Splashpath.

Back in tip number 5, we had a look at how the Dock is laid out. Application shortcuts are on the left, folders on the right.

It’s pretty clear what the shortcuts do: they open an app for you. If it’s already open, they switch you to it. You can change which ones stay in the Dock all the time, so that you’ve got quick access to the applications you use most often. But what happens with the folders on the right, and how do they work differently?

The idea with folders in the Dock is to make it easier to get to what’s inside them. When they’re in the Dock, they’re known as “stacks”.