Friday Favorite Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Friday Favorites: Using Little Snitch to stop apps from phoning home

by Kelly Hodgkins (Dec 9th, 2011)

One thing that drives me mad is when applications try to phone home with information. Usually, these requests are benign; the app is either looking for the latest update or making a serial number verification request. If it's a rogue app, ...

Time Machine holds a place in my heart, and it should in yours too

by Erica Sadun (Jan 7th, 2011)

One of my TUAW colleagues who shall remain nameless revealed to us yesterday that he doesn't use Time Machine. "Don't talk to me about Time Machine," he said. "I hate it!" My goodness, I thought. Is that even possible? I cannot recount the ...

Friday Favorite (on a Tuesday): OpenTerminal

by Brett Terpstra (Jun 22nd, 2010)

I'm aware that it's not, in fact, Friday. When we find an app that's not new, but is really useful to us, we usually save it for a Friday before we salivate all over it. I'm an impatient guy, though, so here's your Friday Favorite on a Tuesday. It's ...

Friday Favorite: BetterZip

by Brett Terpstra (May 21st, 2010)

BetterZip is a utility I might not use every day, but I'm very thankful for it when I need it. It's an archive/compression utility which handles a broad array of archive formats, including ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, and some that you rarely see on a Mac, ...

Notational Velocity, Simplenote, and Dropbox bring child-like wonder

by TJ Luoma (Feb 19th, 2010)

The phrase "game changer" is no doubt cliché and overused, but every now and again it just fits. I had heard about Notational Velocity when Merlin Mann posted about it on 43Folders. It changed how I use my iMac, MacBookPro, and iPhone, ...

Friday Favorite: Snippets

by Brett Terpstra (Jan 8th, 2010)

Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that makes us grin like an idiot every time we use it. This week, Brett tells us about his favorite new snippet manager. If you write ...

Friday Favorite: Ommwriter, the Zen word processor for writers

by Michael Grothaus (Dec 11th, 2009)

More Friday Favorites, the apps, tools and accessories that we love to share. As a writer, I love Scrivener. It's great for managing large and complex projects. But for shorter pieces, this blog post for example, I've found a new favorite, ...

Friday Favorite: OmniDiskSweeper helps you track down where all your disk space went

by TJ Luoma (Oct 23rd, 2009)

"Where did all my disk space all go?" When I was in college, each student was allotted 4 megabytes ('mega' is not a typo) of disk space for both email and files. Granted, this was back in the early '90s, before anyone had heard of "www." or had ...

Friday Favorite: HistoryHound, bookmark with abandon

by Brett Terpstra (Oct 16th, 2009)

Today's Friday Favorite is a new one to me, but it's been around for a while. I just picked up the latest version of HistoryHound from St. Clair Software -- more famous, probably, for Default Folder X -- and have been using it constantly for days. ...

Friday Favorite: FolderGlance

by David Winograd (Oct 9th, 2009)

FolderGlance 2.55, for Snow Leopard only, is a very useful preference pane that adds a number of additions to the Finder. The simplest and most basic thing it does is to add an expanded contextual menu to any folder when the folder is right (or ...

Friday Favorite: SpamSieve 2.76

by David Winograd (Sep 18th, 2009)

My Friday favorite is SpamSieve. We have mentioned it a few times previously, but since it has recently been updated to version 2.76 I wanted to sing its praises again. It's the best way I've found to deal with spam. Using Bayesian filtering, ...

Friday Favorite: Snapz Pro X for Mac

by Steven Sande (Aug 14th, 2009)

I was straining my brain today -- admittedly not a hard thing for me to do -- trying to think of a topic for a Friday Favorite. The answer was right in front of me all the time, since one of the most-used applications on my Macs is Snapz Pro X ...

Friday Favorite: Mactracker

by Dave Caolo (Aug 7th, 2009)

Another Friday Favorite, our weekly opportunity to gush over one of our favorite apps. This week's favorite is a must-have reference for all Apple fans. Mactracker has been around for as long as I can remember and is indispensable. It provides ...

Friday Favorite: AppZapper

by Dave Caolo (Jul 31st, 2009)

Every so often I'll go through my Mac's hard drive and delete stuff that's just sitting around. The downloads folder fills with junk especially fast. I also download lots of software out of curiosity, and after a few months my applications folder is ...

Friday Favorite: MainMenu 2 keeps your Mac running smoothly

by Steven Sande (Jul 17th, 2009)

I'm a sucker for Mac maintenance utilities. That's not to say that I run them on a regular basis like I should do, but whenever I find a new one I like to give it a try and see how it's going to work for me. Dare To Be Creative Ltd. recently released ...

Friday Favorite: SpreadTweet

by Dave Caolo (Jul 10th, 2009)

Not since the Cola Wars or the Cold War have we seen a battle as fierce as The Twitter App Wars. Like salmon swimming upstream, each little app is fighting to gain your affection. I believe that there's no one Twitter app to rule them all. Instead, ...