Category: Reviews-HowTos

Recently, upon visiting my Slanted Viewpoint blog, I was shocked to see an advertisement at the top of the page. I had never selected, modified, or added anything to my blog’s settings that might have caused ads to start appearing. What the heck was going on?

Making matters worse, the ad covered over article text, requiring readers to dismiss the ad before they could proceed. Plus, the ad was for cosmetic products, which is completely unrelated to anything I had ever written or would ever write about. I was now angry as well as shocked.

Skeuomorphism is a funny thing. On the one hand, there’s the pre-iOS 7 faux stitching and wooden shelves we all hated, garish replications that served little or no purpose in the digital world. But on the other are things that actually help us, dials and switches that mimic their real-world counterparts to help users navigate through unfamiliar interfaces.

Full-featured digital notebooks generally fall into the former category, imitating objects such as three-ring binders and folded paper to create a sense of nostalgia and comfort. There are plenty of minimal note-takers available for our Macs, but serious organizers don’t stray too far from the paper world, going so far as to design things like staples and paper clips that can actually muddle the overall experience.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cooking is as much a science as it is an art—both following a strict set of instructions or creating a new dish on the spur of the moment can yield excellent results (and full bellies). Even the most extemporaneous chef, however, has a stash of favorite recipes on hand—if not for anything else, then just to draw inspiration from when the next meals comes calling.

Recipes (Mac App Store link) gives chefs of all skill levels a digital box in which they can save, consult, and find their recipes. The app offers an elegant interface that captures all the essentials elements of a recipe: basic data like name, difficulty level, and cooking time are recorded alongside step-by-step instructions and an ingredient list. A separate grocery list is also available, although, unfortunately, there is no way to populate it with a recipe’s ingredients, or to sync it with the Reminders app.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Sharing your pictures is always a risky proposition: Regardless of whether you just email them to a friend or post them on a social network, you never know when someone is going to reuse them, without your permission, in a way that you do not approve of.

Watermarker 1.3 (Mac App Store link) gives you a way to solve this problem by superimposing a mark of your choosing to an existing picture, thus “stamping” with your particular imprint. The app supports three different types of watermarks: text, an image, and strike-through (a set of diagonal lines that cross the image from opposite corners, thus making it unusable in a production scenario).

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Reader Scott Coatsworth has an issue with disappearing shortcuts. He writes:

I need to transfer files from my Mac to another on our network, so I create shortcuts to the relevant folders on the other Mac in my Finder sidebar. Invariably—sometimes after a couple weeks, sometimes after only a day or two—all my shortcuts to the other Mac’s folders disappear and I have to go back and manually set them all up again.

Is there a way to stop my mac from deleting these shortcuts? Or is there an app that will manage them for me so I don’t have to go through this frustrating exercise every time?

This appears to be a bug in Mavericks. Until Apple deals with it you have to find another way to get the job done. One option is to create such a folder alias and leave it on the desktop or place it in the dock (or create a folder and plunk all such aliases into it). Before you can use an alias, you’ll have to ensure that the networked volume that hosts it is mounted on your Mac.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

There are plenty of ways to keep track of changes made to a text document. You can use the track-changes tools built into your word processor (assuming it has them). If your needs are more sophisticated, particularly if you’re collaborating with others, you can use a sophisticated version-control system such as Github, Subversion, CVS. Or you can use a dedicated utility such as Kaleidoscope (which can compare documents, images, and even folders).

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

For some users, “organizing files” in the Finder begins and ends with creating folders and moving files into them. But there are a bunch of other things you can do to manage your files in OS X that, whatever your workflow, will make things way easier.

Smart folders

When you perform a standard Finder search by pressing Command-F or using the search bar in any Finder window, you can save this search as a smart folder by clicking the Save button in the top-right of the window. This will save the search as a Smart Folder which, when opened, will only show the files that match your search criteria. (You can also create smart folders by selecting New Smart Folder from the File menu.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If you’re a hard-working rock band, a tough flight case is de rigeur for transporting precious instruments and equipment around the world. NSP Direct—trading as The Flight Case Company and branding its products as NSP Cases—is known for its durable cases for shipping AV equipment, but the company also makes a kit for protecting the similarly precious Mac computer in your life.

I looked at the Flight Cases for iMac. They take the familiar flight-case style of sober black boxes with toughened aluminium edges and reinforced metal corners that can withstand the external battering of transport by plane, truck, and car.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mavericks’s Finder tags feature offers a number of benefits over the older file and folder labels, but one of the drawbacks of tags is that items are no longer colored with your preferred tag (nee label) color—you see just a tiny, colored dot next to the file name. The reason for this is clear: While you could apply only a single label to a file or folder in OS X 10.8 and earlier, you can apply multiple tags to files, so OS X wouldn’t know which of those tags to use for the item color.

Still, I really miss the colored folders of old, as I used those colors as quick-glance “Hey, this is [important/finished/etc.]” indicators. I’ve been able to restore an approximation of this feature using Erica Sadun’s $3 Folderol, which makes it quick and easy to colorize the icon of any folder.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If you’re a user of the new Mac Pro, chances are the machine is going to spend the majority of its time in one spot. However, if you need to move it from place to place on occasion—or even regularly—you’re going to want to do so in a way that doesn’t expose your Mac Pro to unnecessary risk. Sure, you can use the box it came in, but the Mac Pro Go Case from WaterField Designs is a more permanent and elegant solution.

Michael Homnick