Cool tools Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

ScreenSharingMenulet hits 2.0

by TJ Luoma (Mar 25th, 2010)

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 ...

No more accidental Caps Lock with CapSee

by Brett Terpstra (Mar 17th, 2010)

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 ...

Saving your surfing on the Mac

by Brett Terpstra (Mar 15th, 2010)

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 ...

Panic's free ShrinkIt turns humongous Illustrator PDFs into tiny ones

by Steven Sande (Feb 18th, 2010)

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 ...

Notepod+ helps you sketch your iPad ideas

by Mike Schramm (Feb 15th, 2010)

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 ...

Home security on your iPhone

by Lauren Hirsch (Jan 24th, 2010)

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. ...

Found footage: Jailbreak BTstack support extended to 1st gen iPod touch

by Erica Sadun (Jan 24th, 2010)

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. ...

BumpTop offers a 3D desktop on your Mac

by Mike Schramm (Jan 20th, 2010)

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 ...

SlipCover helps make case icons for your media

by Mike Schramm (Jan 18th, 2010)

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 ...

Rain Design's iMac turntable sends the iMac for a spin

by Steven Sande (Jan 13th, 2010)

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 ...

iPhone devsugar: Simple table badges

by Erica Sadun (Jan 7th, 2010)

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 ...

Snow Leopard Creator Codes: one more time, with feeling

by Brett Terpstra (Jan 7th, 2010)

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 ...

AppZapper: a great big upgrade for a small utility

by Brett Terpstra (Jan 6th, 2010)

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 ...

KeyRemap4MacBook: the utility keyboard lovers have dreamed of

by Brett Terpstra (Jan 5th, 2010)

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 ...

BetterTouchTool makes multi-touch infinitely more useful, for free

by Brett Terpstra (Jan 5th, 2010)

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 ...

Found Footage: iPhone/Mouse integration

by Erica Sadun (Jan 4th, 2010)

What happens when you combine two amazing jailbreak utilities on the iPhone? You achieve remote mouse based support! iPhone developer Lance "ashikase" Fetters, author of the amazing Backgrounder jailbreak app, wrote a VNC style extension for the ...