Filed under: Cool tools

ScreenSharingMenulet is a free (donations requested) program which I've mentioned before that runs in your menu bar and gives you access to computers for quick access to screen sharing.

My success with Back To My Mac was "spotty" at best until I started using the DynDNS service, port forwarding, and DHCP Reservations to get 100% reliable screen sharing sessions between my home and work computers. (It's not nearly as complicated as it sounds. Most of it is just one-time configuration which will then make things easier every time you do it in the future.) This does not require a subscription to MobileMe or involve any cost.

DynDNS hosts don't appear in the Finder like Back To My Mac hosts do, which is where ScreenSharingMenulet comes in. Click on the menu bar icon, type in the DynDNS hostname (check the box to "Add to My Computers"), and voilà! You're connected as easily as you always thought Back To My Mac would be, but never was.

ScreenSharingMenulet has just released a new version 2.0 which has preferences to show/hide Back to My Mac Hosts and show/hide local IP addresses. It also fixes a few bugs. One change that people may not like as much is the removal of the "Recent Hosts" submenu, but frequently contacted hosts can easily be added to the "My Computers" menu by checking a box when initiating the connection. A few other minor changes were also made.

Even if Back To My Mac worked consistently and reliably, I would still prefer ScreenSharingMenulet for initiating the connection because it's easier and faster to reach from my menu bar than going through Finder.

If you've ever accidentally turned on your Caps Lock key and caused some trouble, Threemagination's utility CapSee may be just what you're looking for. It simply displays a bezel notification on your screen when you hit the Caps Lock key, reminding you that Caps Lock is on. It's free, and useful for anyone who might need such a reminder.

Threemagination has just released the latest version of CapSee, which adds the ability to hide the menu icon and make CapSee as unobtrusive as you like.

Personally, I always remap my Caps Lock key to an Option key in my System Preferences (go to the Keyboard pane and look in the lower right for the Modifier Keys button). OS X also provides a small icon in password dialogs that lets you know you've got Caps Lock on. There are, I'm sure, plenty of people who actually use Caps Lock for legitimate purposes, which is where CapSee shines. If you're suffering from Accidental Caps Lock Syndrome, give it a shot.

I'd wager that most of you spend as much of your time on the web as I do, and that it's one of the first places you look for answers to just about any question. As a web designer, I look there for inspiration, solutions and am constantly learning how to improve my design and my code with the help of the internet community.

It's become important, over time, for me to be able to re-locate the answers I've found, and to archive things that have made a difference for me. I don't just want a folder full of bookmarks, I want to be able to search my local repository in a more abstract way. The tools for doing this are abundant, and many of them free. I thought I'd share part of my current system for saving my tracks across the 'net.

The brilliant minds at Panic noticed that something interesting was happening with PDF files created by Adobe Illustrator. Like many developers, Panic uses Adobe Illustrator to create icons and other image resources for their applications. The resulting PDF files, which were relatively "big-boned" (a politically-correct way of saying "fat"), would magically shrink in size when they were run through Apple's Mac OS X PDF processing. Apple's method is used when you save a PDF from Preview, which explains why most of the time those files are fairly small in size.

Being the intelligent chaps that they are, the Panic engineers decided to look into the cause of this. What did they find? "Will started digging into the files and brother, you won't believe what he found. Swatches, patterns, preview bitmaps, all sort of metadata; even though we'd specifically turned off all the extra options when saving from Illustrator: Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities, Embed Page Thumbnails, etc."

Apparently just opening the obese PDFs in Preview and then saving them would shrink the file sizes dramatically. Rather than force their staff to go through this process each time they found a large Illustrator PDF, Panic did what most developers would do and wrote an application to automate the process. Devs can simply take a big batch of files, like the contents of an application's Resources folder, drop 'em onto ShrinkIt (download link), and watch the file sizes magically shrink. According to Panic, ShrinkIt can reduce an app bundle size by 4 megabytes.

While ShrinkIt is a Panic-internal utility, the company has made it available to the world for free. Please note that ShrinkIt is primarily made for shrinking simple vector-resource PDFs, and probably won't work well on press-ready PDFs.

From the makers of the Notepod comes the Notepod+, which does for the iPad what the original paper version of the iPhone accomplished. It allows you to sketch out any app ideas or UI insights you might happen to have laying around. One of the refrains we heard from at Macworld last week was that the iPad was a completely different animal -- apps on the new device won't (and shouldn't) be the same as apps already running on the iPhone (even though iPhone apps will work on both devices). So if you want an iPad-sized, erm, pad to draw your ideas on, Notepod+ is it.

And as you can see in the picture above, it doubles as a mousepad and/or a plain old pen-and-paper notetaker as well. The pad itself is US$19.95, and wireless filesharing comes free -- just rip the top page off and mail it out to anyone you want to share it with!

We all know how the iPhone can secure itself, but you can get it to secure your entire house as well.

A while back, I briefly toyed with the idea of going without a landline. It's an alluring prospect, and strikes me as satisfyingly post-modern. But one thing held me back: my home security system, which relied on a landline to connect it to central monitoring. So even though I went through a brief affair with Vonage until Verizon FiOS Triple Play pulled me back in, I had to keep a limited line connected to the house for our security system.

I tried to get rid of it. Oh, how I tried. But until recently, retrofitting the system to go cellular, or swap it out with a more modern system using (for example) a secure cellular connection, always cost more than it was worth. Then our home security monitoring contract price went way up and all of a sudden, the price difference between retrofitting and acquiring a new system went down. That made getting the new system worthwhile.

I went about trying to find a security system that would give me the flexibility I needed, as well as the knowledge that I wasn't compromising home security. I already ran a small security program in the house to run a video baby monitor, but for the whole house, I needed some kind of central monitoring. Enter Alarm.com.

The BTstack project that we've covered before on TUAW, offers a way for iPhone and iPod touch units to communicate with arbitrary external Bluetooth devices. To date, it's been used to connect keyboards, mice, and wiimotes with iPhone software.

This system has now been extended to the first generation iPod touch, bringing all six iPhoneOS models into the Bluetooth arena. Since the 1st gen touch does not provide its own built-in system, it requires an external module. This video uses the dongle described at this blog post to demonstrate the keyboard connection functionality.

Although the 1st generation touch is an increasingly deprecated system, it's nice to know that it hasn't been left out of the Bluetooth picture. Old touch units make excellent hobbyist systems. When jailbroken, access to a full suite of Unix tools offers a budget-priced platform with great prototyping potential. With this new Bluetooth stack support, the 1st gen touch has just become an even more exciting system for projects like remote monitoring.

I've never really gotten into the whole 3D file navigation thing (ever since "It's a Unix system! I know this!", it's seemed pretty corny), but BumpTop might be the exception I've been waiting for. It's a 3D overlay for your OS X desktop that turns files into 3D objects to move around, pin on the walls, pile up or break down as needed. It's not too shabby -- with all of these things, there's a fine line between adding in graphic splashes for the heck of it, and making sure everything has a real function, and it seems like BumpTop walks that line pretty well. Most of the graphical flair does actually help with a function also. The app also supports the multitouch trackpad on MacBooks, so there's a little bit of innovation to play with as well.

Mashable says BumpTop is planning even more integration in the future, piping content from sites like Facebook and Twitter straight to one of the desktop's walls, and more involvement with the touch interface, even as we await the tablet's announcement.

I don't know if it's quite enough for me to leave behind the 2D icons and filenames that have worked well so far, but BumpTop is an interesting experiment in adding that third dimension into your normal workspace. The app is a free trial download, with a Pro version available (multitouch support, unlimited stickies, instant search) for $29.

Here's a cool app we haven't mentioned yet here on TUAW -- SlipCover is an app that will help you put together some beautiful icons for your Mac's media files, from DVDs to video games or anything else that needs a cool looking icon. The app itself revolves around "case" files, which are basically templates like the Blu-ray, PS3, and Xbox 360 branding on their DVD cases, to which you can then drag and drop other media on to (for example, put a Watchmen movie poster on a Blu-ray "case," and you've got an icon that looks exactly like a Blu-ray version of the DVD), and then your media files on there to apply the icon automatically. No more hunting around through file names or weird previews of your media -- you can just browse through a Delicious Library-style set of thumbnails to find whatever you want to watch.

Now, you may say that you just get all your media from iTunes, and that those come with thumbnails and covers already, and that's a fair point. But for those of us who obtain media from all over the place, it's nice to have a way to make it look all professional and purty. Slipcover is a free download over on their website.

[via Lifehacker]

iMacs are great, except when you have one sitting with its back to a wall and you need to plug something into the back of it. Particularly with the larger models, you end up having to pick up the iMac and swing it around to get to those ports on the back. Wouldn't it be a lot easier if you could just spin it?

That's the idea behind the Rain Design i360, a turntable that encloses the base of an iMac or Apple Cinema Display, and then allows easy movement of the display. Want to show a co-worker on the "back" side of your iMac something? Just spin the entire computer around. Need to plug or unplug something? No problem -- just swing the iMac or Cinema Display around and do it.

I've had an i360 on my first-generation Intel iMac since just after I bought it, and I can't count the number of times that it has saved me from having to pick up the computer and slide it around to plug something in. I've recommended the i360 to many of my Mac consulting customers who have iMacs or Cinema Displays, and many of them end up buying the device.

TUAW's devsugar series helps introduce developers to tools and tricks that they might not yet be familiar with. Today's tip centers on table-level badging and how to simply and easily add badged cells to your iPhone Xcode projects.

Badges are a natural partner for table view cells. When working with one-to-many data like mailboxes with letters, or RSS feeds with articles, they indicate how many items (or new items) branch off of each available choice. The standard Apple SDK does not offer badge functionality.

iPhone Developer Tim Grant Davies to the rescue. He has built an open source github repository for his TDBadgedCell project. Distributed under the Creative Commons Public License, this class allows you to add numbers to the right of each table view cell, and choosing a background color for each number.

Each badge is drawn in a custom view using CoreGraphics. This means the class does not rely on extra images stored in memory, and the badges are drawn quickly on demand. You can set color properties for each badge, indicating hues for both the normal and highlighted states.

I recently wrote about Ross Carter's Snow Leopard Creater Code discoveries and his solution, LaunchCodes. It turns out there were a few issues with the initial implementation, such as Apple Events not being passed along. Normally when you find a file in Spotlight, a PDF for example, opening it launches Preview and the query that was used to locate the file shows up in the search field in Preview. This was no longer working in LaunchCodes, though Ross says he's working on that right now. In the meantime, Michel Fortin has produced Magic Launch, and it solves the majority of the issues that have been presented.

Magic Launch installs as a System Preferences pane, and you can drag and drop applications to it to register their file type. Then, you can choose a default application, but optionally specify that it should launch in it the application which created it, when possible. Probably the coolest feature, though, is the rule handling. Similar to rules in Mail.app, you can set up a series of criteria to determine when a different app should open the file. You can have multiple rules, and each rule can check things like file location, file name or extension, text contents, hex contents and/or ASCII contents. That's pretty nifty, and goes beyond the default functionality that was available before we even needed apps like this.

Magic Launch is free to try out, and costs $14US for a license. If you're still finding documents annoyingly launching the wrong applications, go download it and give it a try.

I discovered AppZapper years ago. It was a huge boon for me, helping me keep my support folders a little cleaner as I began the early stages of my habit of installing 2 or more new apps a day, trying them, and usually deleting them. It let me drag an application to its interface, and would then search for related files that application may have left around the hard drive. A quick double-check (by me) to make sure it wasn't mistaken, one click and poof, all traces removed.

I've tried other, similar applications over the years ... CleanApp has some great features, and Amnesia is pretty cool, but AppZapper "just worked." I managed to stay loyal to it long after I had assumed its development had gone dead. Then, to my pleasant surprise, a major update dropped yesterday. My AppZapper is not only freshened up, it's bursting with some very cool features.

I'm not a keyboard-only guy; I know when a mouse makes more sense. That being said, if I can do it from my keyboard, I do. So, as a followup to my post on the handy BetterTouchTool, I'd like to point out another free utility, KeyRemap4MacBook. It's an awkward moniker, and it's not pretty, either, but it's stable, works with any Mac (not just MacBooks, as the name would indicate) and offers drool-worthy functionality.

So, what does it do? Out of the box, it offers you dozens and dozens of options for remapping keys and key combinations to potentially more useful actions. Turn your space bar into a shift key when it's pressed in combination with another letter. Turn your trackball into the world's biggest Mighty Mouse scroll ball when you're holding control and command.

My favorite right now is remapping control-i,j,k and l to arrow keys, meaning I no longer have to move my right hand for basic cursor functions when Emacs mode isn't supported or applicable. I've also got the right option key on my aluminum Apple keyboard set up to turn my arrow keys into page up, page down, home and end when used in combination. In short, the usability of my keyboard has skyrocketed. I shudder to think what will happen the next time I jump on someone else's computer and my muscle memory has to re-adjust.

KeyRemap4MacBook can be used to improve accessibility, or to offer familiar shortcuts to switchers. You can even have it remap keys only in certain applications, meaning I can have Command-R remap to Control-R in VMWare or Fusion ... that will save me a lot of fumbles when testing multiple browsers! There's also the capability to add your own mappings, with sample definitions included. It's not exactly a breeze to customize, but it could be worse. I recall it being much more difficult to pull off this kind of extensive remapping in the past, even with tools like ControllerMate in the game.

KeyRemap4MacBook is free, and you can grab a copy at the pqrs.org website. There's even source code available, if you're savvy with C++ and wondering how it works. There's a fully-functional uninstall feature in the preference panel, so you can try it worry-free!

We recently covered a utility called MagicPrefs that adds a hatful of new and configurable multi-touch gestures to your Magic Mouse. Well, there's another free utility called BetterTouchTool that works with both trackpads and Magic Mice, providing a huge number of gestures and infinite possibilities for configuration. BetterTouchTool is a fork of the MultiClutch project, built for Snow Leopard and expanding the feature set greatly. It's the work of Andreas Hegenberg (also the author of SecondBar), and it's come a long way since the first alpha version I tested a while back.

Aside from improved stability, the interface is one of the elements that's come the farthest. It's now quite easy to start adding gestures such as 'Three Finger Swipe Down' and 'Four Finger Click,' and assign them to predefined actions like 'Show Desktop' or 'Open Finder.' You can also assign any shortcut key you like, or assign a gesture to launch any application ... meaning you can make just about anything happen. BetterTouchTool also has actions available that control window sizing and movement, ala SizeUp, but with gestures.

Groups of gestures can be assigned to specific applications, or made global. The latest version includes presets (which you can switch between), import, and export. Separate gestures are available for the trackpad and the Magic Mouse, and the new "Live View" feature makes it very easy to gain precise control over sensitivity settings and to test out gestures. BetterTouchTool is free, and is likely to remain that way, according to the author. It's still got the occasional glitch, but development is rapid and it's improving and expanding almost daily. If you've got a MacBook or MacBook Pro with a multi-touch trackpad, a Magic Mouse, or both, give it a shot!