CommandQ is a Mac utility that stops you from accidentally quitting apps when using the keyboard shortcut "⌘" (or command) and "Q".

Unfortunately, we are all susceptible to moments of human error. This means, with the ⌘ + Q shortcut, we sometimes quit apps we don't mean to. Perhaps when we're meaning to hit ⌘ and W or ⌘ and the TAB key. I know I've done it too many times to count!

Thankfully, there's an app for that! CommandQ is a Mac utility app that stops apps from quitting unless you press and hold down the ⌘ + Q shortcut for a short period of time. This gives you a moment to catchup with your mistake and let go before the app quits. It's a straightforward concept, but has the potential to save you a lot of frustration and stress.

CommandQ lets you customize the period of time it takes for ⌘ + Q to take effect, from half a second to two seconds. You can also specify which apps CommandQ works with, so it's only the important apps which require a longer ⌘ + Q press to quit.

CommandQ is a simple, well-designed app that will go largely unnoticed until it saves you from an unfortunate mistake. It costs US$3.99 or is available as a free trial for 30 days. It's not available on the Mac App Store, but you can get it from the CommandQ website here.

Friday Favorite: CommandQ for Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: CommandQ for Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sock Puppets allows just about anyone to quickly and easily create short animated movies using not only sock puppet characters, but (via in-app purchases) aliens, politicians and Halloween characters. The adorable app is from a software company Smith Micro -- not exactly known for its consumer wares. Sock Puppets is powered by Anime Studio, however, and some time ago the company bought up applications like Poser, and now offers some cool specialized visual artist tools.

As for Sock Puppets, I can tell you the app is a lot of fun. My kids have already created a number of short films with it. The free version comes with a few basic sock puppets, but for about $5 you can unlock all the added characters, plus extended recording and the ability to save to your camera roll. There's also a fully unlocked version of the app for $4. It's well worth it. Basic recording time is 30 seconds, but extended is 90 -- just enough time for kids to get in enough story.

Creating animated puppet shows

To create a video you select your puppets, a background, some props and tap the record button. The app detects voice, and attempts to move the mouth of the puppet along with the vocals. The puppet animations are well-done although more than once the audio clipped, causing a small glitch in some movies.

Since this isn't a pro app, you're not going to see extensive support for phonemes or the ability to separate vocals from music -- it's just mostly going with the overall sound. Still, it's quite good and looks fluid and natural. Combined with the animations used when moving a character around, it's a lot of fun to see.

While recording you can move your puppet around, not just side to side, but in a pseudo-3D which scales the puppets up or down, depending. Not all puppets can do this, as the sock puppets are locked into sideways motion only. In-app purchased puppets like the aliens and Halloween characters can move all over and can be resized during the animation. My kids enjoyed scaling a creature up or down as if they were shrinking or growing.

What's cool is you can just tap and move any character at any time, and pinch to scale them.

Sock Puppets alters your voice as well on a per-puppet basis. You can tweak the settings of the voice changes, customizing them to your liking. I found the defaults to be quite pleasing and well-done. They matched the look of the characters, especially (my favorite) the aliens.

Recording is easy enough, as there's a record button available while you move stuff around, but saving your masterpiece to the camera roll will require an in-app purchase. You can share your video to YouTube without this, although the export can take a while.

Conclusion

While there are a lot of apps to distract kids out there, I found Sock Puppets easy to use and a lot of fun. My kids agree -- they created over a dozen short movies within a few days, and all of them looked excellent. If you're willing to spend $4 you can buy the "complete" version with all characters, sets and utilities unlocked. I'm hopeful Smith Micro will expand Sock Puppets with more characters in the future, but it also has me more intrigued with their pro apps (which was perhaps the goal as well). We'll keep an eye on the consumer efforts from the company going forward, especially if Sock Puppets is an indication that the company is looking to provide more of these fun tools.

Friday Favorite: Sock Puppets originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Sock Puppets originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yesterday around the TUAW water cooler a number of us expressed our love of Due, an app for Mac and iOS that is basically a simple timer/reminder application (my original review here). After trying dozens of timer apps, I think Due wins for a number of features that make it stand out from a very crowded field. After all, your iDevice comes with a timer in the Clock app, and there's Apple's Reminders app. While Reminders syncs with iCloud, your alarms in the Clock app do not. Due can help you stay focused and never overcook a boiling egg again.

Due's interface is simple as can be. There are three views: Reminders, Timers and Logged Reminders. You can quickly set a reminder for later in the day, or whenever. Due accepts natural language instructions, so you could say "next Thursday at 1 PM" and it'll set a reminder alarm for just that. Note that Due doesn't integrate with the built-in Reminders app, so I'm only referring to reminders (lower case) within Due itself.

Once a reminder has gone off or you check it off manually, those go into Logged Reminders. This is handy if you need to recall what you did or if you need to remind yourself of the same thing again, later.

I tend to use the timer function more frequently (as I use my calendar for appointments and OmniFocus for repeating tasks and "to do" items). I have a 25-minute timer for Pomodoros, a 5-minute timer for breaks and a couple of others for things I need to do at some point in the day, but things which require me to focus on just that thing for an allotted amount of time. By doing this, I help my squirrel-like brain stay focused on some critical tasks throughout the day, but it also helps me be flexible enough to not dread going out of being flexible in my daily schedule (more on this in next week's Productivity Tip).

Best of all, Due has just the right number of preferences. From changing sounds to setting a snooze time, Due can be as intrusive or quiet as you like. You can even change the alarms to use Notification Center or Growl -- handy especially if you use something like Prowl. I particularly like the option to "suppress alerts on launch and wake" because I hate opening my Mac to have 30 alarms from past events going off all at once. Is it just me or is that "throw a million notifications at me on wake" thing seem a very obtrusive, Windows 98-like behavior? But I digress.

Due is a rock-solid, beautifully designed app. iCloud sync works flawlessly (you can also use Dropbox) across my Macs and iDevices, meaning I always have what I need where I need it. Most importantly, Due keeps me focused on doing things, and not setting myself up to do things, which is precisely what technology should be doing. You can get the Mac app here or the iOS version here.

Friday Favorite: Due originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Due originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 05 Apr 2013 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A few weeks ago I purchased Things 2 when it was on sale in the Mac App Store. I've used the demo before and have always enjoyed the simplicity of the Things interface and the power of its tagging system.

One difficulty that I faced with Things is its closed environment, which keeps all your tasks inside the app. That's great if you work only with Things, but not so convenient if you want to share your tasks with other apps or other people. You can drag and drop your tasks individually to other apps like OS X Calendar, but the easiest way to export your tasks is to use AppleScript and transfer them in bulk.

One script I regularly use is this export Things to text script from Dexter Ang (thepoch) on github. This script exports the Things database to the desktop as Things Backup.txt. You can tweak the script to export certain parts of the Things database like your Today tasks or Next tasks. This is very handy as you can then edit the text file and upload it to Google Docs or any other app that'll import and format a text document.

Another one of my favorite scripts is this Reminder export script from NightLion.net. This script lets you export all the tasks in your Today list and import them into the OS X Reminders app. I've been using this script each morning to pull my tasks down into Reminders, which I then use to set flexible notifications for the tasks.

The last script that I've adopted is this Mail To Things script posted by marekz on the Cultured Code forums. This script lets you select a message in your OS X Mail inbox and send it quickly to Things. The task will appear in your Things Inbox with the subject as the name of the task and a link to the email in the notes.

These are just a few scripts that I have found during my few weeks with Things. If you have any favorite scripts, please share them in the comments. If you want to create your own scripts, then you should check out Cultured Code's PDF guide to using AppleScript with Things as well as our growing list of AppleScripts for OS X.

Friday Favorite: Using AppleScript to work with tasks in Things 2 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Using AppleScript to work with tasks in Things 2 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 15 Feb 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Whole industries have grown up around our innate desire to remember more, longer and with higher fidelity than we could in the absence of a technological assist. That's what makes an app like Timehop so interesting; it hitches itself to our deep affinity for nostalgia while delivering a clever dose of spontaneous discovery. If an app's MO is to send me a daily notification, I usually delete it in short order; the daily reminder from Timehop, in contrast, has helped it work its way into my frequent rotation.

Timehop's feature set is magically minimal. Sign in with Facebook, then point the app at your image-centric social media feeds (currently supported: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Flickr) and your phone's camera roll. Wait a day.

After that, every morning Timehop will crawl back into the mists and pull out what you were doing, or what you photographed, on the same day one/two/three or more years before. Within the Timehop app, you can re-share that moment with Timehop friends, flag as a favorite, comment or re-publish the status update or photo to Facebook or Twitter.

It seems so simple, but it's surprisingly engaging -- almost-forgotten moments taking you by surprise, whether adorable or bittersweet. The service originally kicked off in February 2011 as 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, an email-based rewind that shadowed your Foursquare history and told you where you'd been. Since January of last year, Timehop has centered on the app experience exclusively and let the email piece fade away.

With leadership from Jonathan Wegener (who created one of my favorite transit apps, the NYC subway where-to-stand guide Exit Strategy) and venture backing from several NYC tech elites (OATV, Spark Capital, TechStars, Foursquare co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, and shiny new MIT Media Lab faculty member Kevin Slavin), Timehop has the pedigree and the resources to shine.

Even if you don't think the idea of reliving your past posts and snapshots sounds particularly appealing, give Timehop a try. You may discover something unexpected. Timehop is a free download in the iOS App Store for iOS 5 or higher.

Friday Favorite: Timehop traces your digital footsteps through the past originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 18 Jan 2013 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Timehop traces your digital footsteps through the past originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 18 Jan 2013 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If long-suffering Dunkin' Donuts franchise owner Fred the Baker had decided to get an office job, chances are his early morning grumble would have been "Time to make the PowerPoint." Doing decks is part of every organization, from the military to not-for-profits to businesses of all sizes; even if you make the chore easier with Keynote, it's still a chore.

Creating something that doesn't look like every other presentation is possible, but if you aren't gifted with design acumen it might not turn out like you hope. PowerPoint's automatic templating helps somewhat, but how about using your iPad to spice up a slide or two?

Giant Thinkwell's free iPad app Haiku Deck may prove to be the spice rack for your flavorless decks. The idea is straightforward: use one of Haiku Deck's provided two-line templates for your slides and the app will search Creative Commons-licensed photos to provide a fitting visual complement to your verbiage. You can swap in your own local photos from the iPad or ones from social services; to share, upload your deck to the Haiku Deck site or export it to a PowerPoint file.

The app is beautifully designed and easy to use; some of the free supplied templates are lovely, and there's a $14.99 optional pack of additional looks (or $1.99 per template, bought solo) if you're not thrilled with the built-in options.

Yes, you can only use two lines of text per slide, so it's not ideal for bullet-heavy fiscal briefings. Yes, the results have a tendency to wander into Demotivators territory. But you can certainly use Haiku Deck to inspire a theme for a longer presentation built in a desktop app, or pull one or two key concept slides into a presentation that's begging for some creative zing.

[hat tip AllThingsD]

Friday Favorite: Haiku Deck for iPad concocts instant presentations originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Sep 2012 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Haiku Deck for iPad concocts instant presentations originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Sep 2012 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There comes a time in a power user's life when the number of his menu bar applications exceeds the amount of real estate in the menu bar, a condition made worse by primary applications with a lot of menus. The cure for this? A handy little app, which is still undergoing testing, called Bartender.

Bartender will roll up menu bar items into one little drop-down menu bar item. That's pretty much it! You can have Bartender hide something entirely, or just pop it under the Bartender menu bar icon.

Keep in mind this is still in beta, so many of my TUAW colleagues weren't able to put system icons into Bartender, but I was. Your mileage may vary, but while the app is in beta it is basically free. You can also choose to buy it now for $7.50, which is half what it will cost when it is out of beta.

If, like me, your menu bar has exceeded the width of what your screen can handle, try Bartender. It's just what you were looking for.

Friday Favorite: Bartender originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 31 Aug 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Bartender originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 31 Aug 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Part of my blogging workflow uses Skitch for screenshots. As a result, I wind up with images all over my desktop at the end of the day like, well, a messy desktop after a busy day. If you find yourself with files constantly cluttering your desktop as well, check out Desktop Tidy on the Mac App Store. It'll hide those files clogging up your workspace at intervals you set, from every few seconds to every few days. But wait, there's more!

Desktop Tidy includes a ton of customization features. Sure, it stashes your files away in your Library folder where Spotlight won't index them (and Finder likes to hide the Library folder by default these days), but that's part of the beauty of the app. Using the menu bar, you'll easily see what files were sent over, make them come back, or search and organize them on the fly.

Here's a neat trick: Ctrl-clicking an item in the menu will restore it to your desktop.

There are filters for filetypes which will allow you to easily spot the files you may typically save to the desktop. In my case these are image files, and Desktop Tidy comes already configured to show a filter of images, easily accessed from the menu bar. In a way, this is easier than mucking about on the desktop itself.

Yes there are other tools and ways to do this, but I think Tidy gives the user a ton of options and ease of use for a decent price (currently US$4.99).

Check out Desktop Tidy if you just can't stand having all those files littering your desktop, no matter how tiny you make them.

Friday Favorite: Desktop Tidy originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 17 Aug 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Desktop Tidy originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 17 Aug 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sometimes you find an app that stands out because it's different and does something fun. One such app is Satellite Eyes from technologist and engineer Tom Taylor. It's a simple OS X app that sits in your menu tray and uses your location information to replace your desktop wallpaper with an overhead satellite view or map view of the surrounding area. Every time you move to a new location, you automatically get a new wallpaper. How cool is that?

You won't find this gem in the Mac App Store (you can read Taylor's story of Mac App Store rejection on his blog), but you can download it for free from the Satellite Eyes website.

Friday Favorite: Satellite Eyes swaps out your OS X desktop wallpaper with satellite imagery of your location originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 22 Jun 2012 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Satellite Eyes swaps out your OS X desktop wallpaper with satellite imagery of your location originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 22 Jun 2012 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When your job (or schoolwork) involves giving presentations to rooms full of more-or-less interested parties, you know how hard it can be to maintain a constructive level of audience attention. The economical cloud audience response system (ARS) provided by the mad scientists at PollEverywhere is a great way to spice up a session with quick, engaging multiple choice and full-text questions.

PollEverywhere's polls display wonderfully on the web (if you've got the Flash player) and do well in Windows versions of PowerPoint, where the appropriate ActiveX control to embed the remote Flash animation is available. For Mac presentation apps, however, the path is not so smooth. Prior versions of the company's Mac Presenter app used a QuickTime workaround to display polls, but it was somewhat clunky and did not automatically cue up when the polling slide appeared on screen.

Time for an improved approach. With the December 2011 release of the all-new Mac Presenter application, the polling experience is now hands-free and incredibly simple. The Mac Presenter app connects to your PollEverywhere hosted account and lets you embed polling references into Keynote or PowerPoint slides with a single click -- the poll identifiers end up as a block of XML code in the slide notes, so you can easily move polling slides from deck to deck. The rest is easy: you just draw a solid color box on your slide where you want the poll to show up. Like magic, when you present that slide, the Mac Presenter app will scale the poll display to cover just that placeholder box.

True, it's a smidge more effort than the Windows PowerPoint configuration, but it's definitely worth it. PollEverywhere offers a free plan that allows up to 40 responses per poll, and business pricing for higher service levels starts at $15 per month. K-12 and higher-ed discounts are also available.

Do you have a favorite Mac app, peripheral/accessory, cloud service or iOS app that you think deserves to be featured as a Friday Favorite? Be sure to let us know.

Friday Favorite: PollEverywhere Mac Presenter grows up originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: PollEverywhere Mac Presenter grows up originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 20 Apr 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Audacity, the venerable and much loved open source audio editor, has a 2.0 release out (as of March 13) in versions for OS X, Windows and GNU/Linux.

Here's a rundown of what has changed:

• Many effects are significantly improved, especially Equalization, Noise Removal and Normalize. Vocal Remover is now included, plus GVerb on Windows and Mac. VAMP analysis plug-ins are now supported.
• Improved label tracks with Sync-Lock Tracks feature in the Tracks Menu. Tracks and selections can be fully manipulated using the keyboard and there can be multiple clips per track. There are many more keyboard shortcuts.
• A new Device Toolbar to manage inputs and outputs, a Timer Record feature and a new Mixer Board view with per-track VU meters.
• Automatic Crash Recovery in the event of abnormal program termination.
• Fast "On-Demand" import of WAV/AIFF files if read directly from source. FLAC now fully supported. Added support for optional FFmpeg library for import/export of AC3/M4A/WMA and import of audio from video files.

Audacity is great for recording live audio, converting analog sources into digital recordings or CDs, and changing the speed or pitch of a recording. For many podcasters, Audacity is the go-to tool for recording and editing. You can edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.

Friday Favorite: Audacity 2.0 delivers free audio editing for Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Audacity 2.0 delivers free audio editing for Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A friend on Twitter asked me the other day if I had a list of the educational apps I have on my iPad. With all the reviews I have done, I was ashamed to admit that I've never taken the time to list those apps that I use on a regular basis with my children.

I reached out to the other writers at TUAW and asked them the same question. Together, we compiled a list of our favorite learning apps for children, and wow, what a list. The apps are presented below in no particular order.

NXTapp ($0.99)

Khan Academy (Free)

Elmo Loves ABCs ($4.99)

Where's my water? ($0.99)

Simple Physics ($0.99)

Simply Find It ($1.99)

SparkleFish ($0.99, 99-cent in-app purchases)

My First Wood Puzzles: Dinosaurs (Free, $1.99 in-app purchase)

Zoo Sounds ($1.99)

Paper by FiftyThree (Free, in-app purchases of $2.99 for tools and $7.99 for everything)

Plants HD for the iPad ($1.99)

Discovery Kids Sharks ($4.99)

Minecraft-Pocket Edition ($6.99; more game-ish, but building with blocks is learning, no?)

Articulation Station (Free; sound packs are $2.99 to $5.99, full app is $49)

Letter of the Day Interactive Activities ($1.99)

AniMatch ($0.99)

iBuildABCs ($0.99)

Junior Bingo ($0.99)

Rocket Speller (Free)

Wood Puzzle USA Map ($1.99)

Word Bingo ($0.99)

Math Bingo ($0.99)

Beginning Sounds Interactive Game ($0.99)

Motion Math Hungry Fish (Free, in-app purchases from $2.99 up to $8.99)

Letter Quiz ($1.99)

Phonics Tic Tac Toe Interactive Game (Free)

Sentence Maker (Free)

Flashcards+ (Free, in-app purchases to get new voices)

Word Jigsaw (Free, in-app purchases to get extra hints and unlock all the levels)

Monster Coloring Book ($2.99)

Math Tables ($1.99)

Word Search + (Free, in-purchase of $1.99 for premium version)

Missing Link (Free, in-app purchases for hints and extra levels)

Bookworm ($2.99)

If you have any educational apps you enjoy, please share them with us in the comments.

Friday Favorite: A bushel of educational apps for learning fun originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: A bushel of educational apps for learning fun originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 17:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Satechi 12-port hub wouldn't look out of place on the control deck of the Death Star. It comes in one color -- black -- and features two banks of ports that glow enticingly when switched on for power via the twin rocker switches at the back end of the unit. One bank includes six ports atop the hub; the second bank has five on top and one front-facing port.

You can use the hub with or without the power adapter, but with it connected you can support self-powered devices; you can charge an iPhone (or multiple iPhones) with ease. iPads will trickle-charge ("No Charging" indicator on screen) but, like most hubs, the Satechi unit doesn't support the double-wattage port spec that the iPads need for rapid charge.

You may not think you need twelve USB ports, but if you're dealing with flash drives or other peripherals, or if you have a MacBook Air and want to maximize your expansion options, the Satechi hub is a perfect fit. The hub currently retails for US$27.99 and comes with a power adapter and a one-meter extension cable.

You can check out our other Friday Favorites, hardware and software alike, here.

Friday Favorite: Satechi 12-port USB Hub originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Satechi 12-port USB Hub originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That might sound like what you're been doing with ⌘ + Tab, but there are a few important differences. The first is that you can choose not only which app you are switching to, but also which window in that app. Optimal Layout can even switch you to specific browser tabs in Safari or Google Chrome.

You can use the mouse with Optimal Layout, but it works especially well for those who prefer the keyboard. Type ⌘ + Option/Alt + F and it will bring up a list of available windows. Start typing and it will match window names. When you find the one you want, simply press Return. This is especially great if you are on a Mac with a small screen or working in multiple full-screen apps, because you can switch between them without using ⌘ + Tab to find the app you want to use.

Optimal Layout is more than just an app/window switcher, it also lets you control the location of windows on the screen with your keyboard. You can maximize (full screen minus the Dock and menu bar), half-screen, quarter-screen, or center any window via the Optimal Layout UI, without bringing that application forward. Just type to find the window you want, and then press the keyboard command for where you want that window to go. Or you can use the menu bar controls (which can also be hidden, if you don't want them to appear) to control the front-most window. If that's not enough, there is even a grid that Optimal Layout can show you and help you position all of your windows on your screen if you need to see multiple windows at once.

The best way to understand Optimal Layout is to see it in action and try it yourself. There is a 94-second screencast on the Optimal Layout homepage, and a few other short screencasts on the support page. There's even a trial version available so you can try before you buy.

Optimal Layout is US$14 and is available on the Mac App Store or directly from the developer. It support Mac OS 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7.

Friday Favorite: Optimal Layout brings app switching and window controls to your fingertips originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Optimal Layout brings app switching and window controls to your fingertips originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I spend a lot of time in the web browser, so much that I use web apps more than their standalone counterparts. I use twitter.com to compose a tweet, gmail.com to check my email and so on. As a result, I use several plug-ins and extensions to improve the efficiency of my online work. In a previous Friday Favorite, I covered Lazarus, a form recovery tool. Today, I'm going to tell you about After The Deadline, an extension for Firefox or Chrome that'll spell and grammar check your writing.

After the Deadline works with most text fields in a web browser. It appears as a small ABC icon in the bottom right corner of a text box. When you're done typing your comment, tweet or feedback, you can click the icon and the extension will both spell and grammar check your writing. When you're checking with After the Deadline, the ABC icon will change to red. Spelling errors will be highlighted in red; grammar errors in green. One little drawback with the tool is that you can edit the errors, but you can't edit the surrounding text until you click the ABC icon and turn the checking off.

It's a step up from OS X's spell check feature because the grammar check will pick up a lot of writing errors that spell check doesn't detect. The most common one I get is word repetition such as "the the" or "a a." It's not as thorough as a dedicated grammar tool like Grammarly, but those tools cost money and don't integrate into the browser as an extension.

After the Deadline is perfect for informal writing like comments, emails, or feedback forms. It'll prevent you from making a glaring spelling error when you're communicating online. There's also a Wordpress plugin, if you use that CMS. The extension works with Firefox and Chrome for the Mac and is available for free from After The Deadline's website.

Friday Favorite: After the Deadline originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: After the Deadline originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Don't you hate that sinking feeling you get when you spend five to ten minutes filling out a form -- and then you lose all the data because of a hiccup in your Internet connection, or because of Safari's tab reloading quirks? Before that happens to you again, you should check out Lazarus. It's an extension for Safari, Chrome and Firefox that stores your form data in case you lose it. It works with almost all web forms, with web-based email clients and even in some content management systems like WordPress.

The extension/plug-in stores your text in a database and lets you restore it with a single click. Each field that is supported by the extension will display the Lazarus ankh symbol. If you lose your data, you can click on the symbol to restore the cached text.

The Safari extension has a few options that'll let you encrypt form data, exclude sites from working with Lazarus, and change the number of days the form data is stored. Lazarus is lightweight and doesn't affect browser performance. It's a life-saver for WordPress bloggers and anyone who fills in a lot of online forms. Lazarus is available for free from Interclue's website.

Friday Favorite: Lazarus Extension for Safari saves your form text originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: Lazarus Extension for Safari saves your form text originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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, though, it could be sending back information you'd rather not share.

To find out which apps are phoning home, you can install Little Snitch. It's a US$30 app that alerts you whenever a program tries to establish an outgoing Internet connection. You can choose to block this connection, or let it through on a case-by-case basis. You can also specify a rule to handle this connection attempt in the future, so you don't have to be alerted each time the app phones home again.

Little Snitch gives you fine control over these connection attempts. Besides permanently blocking a connection, you can also choose to stop it for a single session. This session-based blocking is convenient for travelers who are using a cellular connection and want to limit their data consumption.

Little Snitch is an excellent app for tracking your outgoing Internet connection. You'd be surprised by the number of apps that try to phone home and how often they do it. Google Chrome is one of the worst offenders in this group as it tries to connect to the Google mothership several times a day. If you want to try it out yourself, there's a limited time trial of Little Snitch that runs for a 3 hours at a time. The full, unlimited app costs $30 and is available from Objective Development's website.

Friday Favorites: Using Little Snitch to stop apps from phoning home originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorites: Using Little Snitch to stop apps from phoning home originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I cannot recount the number of times that Time Machine has saved me from thoughtless text edits or file deletions that I later regretted. Surely that has happened to you too -- you edit something in-place without saving an unmodified original. That's the way most people work. Few are diligent, methodical, and neurotic enough to save every state along the way as they work, version numbering and backing up as they go.

There's pharmaceuticals for those people. There's Time Machine for the rest of us.

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

Time Machine holds a place in my heart, and it should in yours too originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Jan 2011 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Time Machine holds a place in my heart, and it should in yours too originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 07 Jan 2011 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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 five o'clock somewhere.

This one's for the geeks. If you have no idea why you'd want to open the current finder folder in Terminal, you'll have little interest in this app, and I hope the rest of today's news is more thrilling for you. If, however, you get a little excited about a button on your Finder window that drops you into the UNIX subsystem, read on: I think I've found the best-of-breed.

OpenTerminal does what it says, it opens Terminal and cd's to the folder of the foreground Finder window. There are plenty of AppleScript or Automator-based buttons that will do this, and apps like cdto do the job in a very utilitarian fashion. It's pretty easy to craft your own, too, but this free utility packs a few extra tricks.

Continue reading Friday Favorite (on a Tuesday): OpenTerminal

Friday Favorite (on a Tuesday): OpenTerminal originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite (on a Tuesday): OpenTerminal originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BetterZip opens or creates your archive in a file-list format, and you can drag files between Finder and BetterZip to add to or extract from the archive. Creating new archives is just a "File->New" or Command-N away, and you can save them in Zip, TAR, TGZ, TBZ, 7-Zip or XAR formats. While the Finder lets you easily create archives by right-clicking a file selection and choosing "Archive," it doesn't allow you to easily edit the archive or add to it. For quick compression of one or more files for emailing, it's fine and I use it regularly, but for larger archives that need to be more flexible, BetterZip is an excellent choice. BetterZip also makes it easy to search large archives for a single file you're looking for. Read on for more reasons BetterZip is my Friday Favorite ...

Continue reading Friday Favorite: BetterZip

Friday Favorite: BetterZip originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 21 May 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Friday Favorite: BetterZip originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 21 May 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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