Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

BetterZip is a better zip

by Mat Lu (Dec 24th, 2007)

With zip support built into OS X a third-party compression utility has to bring something special to the table, and BetterZip does. Basically it allows you to open and inspect archives without expanding the whole thing first. This can be useful if ...

Warp: change Spaces with your mouse

by Mat Lu (Dec 22nd, 2007)

Kent Sutherland, the developer of the well-known Chax, a utility for making iChat easier to use, has a nice new utility for improving Leopard's Spaces virtual desktops as well. Warp is a preference pane allows you to switch between Spaces just by ...

Saft updated for Safari 3.0.4

by Cory Bohon (Dec 22nd, 2007)

As many Mac users already know, Saft is the "Swiss-Army Knife" of web browser plug-ins. Some of the most loved features in Saft include: full screen browsing, tab thumbnails, and auto-hiding the download window. Much to the chagrin of fans, Saft was ...

DEVONthink gains Spotlight support

by Mat Lu (Dec 20th, 2007)

The guys over at DEVONtechnologies have announced updates for a number of their applications. Most importantly the entire line of DEVONthink information managing software (along with DEVONnote) now natively support Spotlight. They note that this ...

Leopard compatible build of GrowlMail

by Mat Lu (Dec 20th, 2007)

One of the unfortunate incompatibilities Leopard brought with it was breaking GrowlMail, the plugin for Mail.app that shows new messages via the Growl notification system. However, Evan Schoenberg has now posted a test build of GrowlMail on the Growl ...

Columnist: Microsoft could learn from Apple's Family Packs

by Mike Schramm (Dec 19th, 2007)

Newsflash: Microsoft messed up. Yes, I know, that doesn't come as news to most of you (that's why you're here), but Joe Wilcox over at eWeek was surprised by the fact that while Apple's Leopard Family Pack pricing lead to some nice sales numbers, ...

Leopard Love: Advanced Selection in Preview

by Erica Sadun (Dec 18th, 2007)

Over at MurphyMac, Murphy has posted a great tutorial about the new Leopard selection tools for Preview.app. As usual, there's an excellent screencast that walks you through the entire process. The new "Extract Shape" tool lets you draw a rough ...

Quick Look Plugin sites

by Mat Lu (Dec 17th, 2007)

It should be clear by now that I love Leopard's Quick Look, particularly because of the modular way that Apple designed it so that it can be expanded and extended by third parties. And those third parties are responding! To keep track of all these ...

TUAW Tip: Getting out of Setup Assistant hell

by Mat Lu (Dec 15th, 2007)

Last night, after installing the QuickTime 7.3.1 update on my Leopard machine, upon restart I was greeted with a distressing sight: the OS X Setup Assistant that's only supposed to run when you first install OS X. Furthermore, even if I completed the ...

Leopard killed these freeware apps?

by Mike Schramm (Dec 13th, 2007)

Here's an interesting list of applications supposedly killed by Leopard. There's no question that there's a huge amount of functionality in Leopard that was taken care of in Tiger by third-party apps (and this is just a list of freeware-- commenters ...

Default Folder X 4.0 refined for Leopard

by Mat Lu (Dec 13th, 2007)

St. Clair Software has just released version 4.0 of its well-known Default Folder X for both Leopard and Tiger. This utility enhances OS X's Open and Save dialogs in a number of ways, allowing easy access to favorites and Spotlight comments, ...

Fluid makes site specific browsers easy

by Mat Lu (Dec 12th, 2007)

We've covered the concept of site specific browsers before. Basically these are stand-alone browsers designed to work with just one website, e.g. Gmail. Fluid takes this idea to the next level by automating the process of creating Webkit based site ...

Reducing PDF file size with a Quartz filter

by Mat Lu (Dec 12th, 2007)

Apple has an interesting video tip up this week on reducing the file size of graphic intensive PDFs created from the Print dialog. In their example they make a PDF from a Keynote presentation containing lots of graphics, and substantially reduce its ...

Anxiety iCal ToDo management

by Mat Lu (Dec 11th, 2007)

Anxiety is a new Leopard-only "lightweight To-Do management" tool that integrates with iCal and Mail to give you easy access to your To-Dos in a sleek interface. It displays either all of your To-Dos or To-Dos from a single iCal calendar in one of ...

Leopard Love: Apple boosts Calculator

by Erica Sadun (Dec 10th, 2007)

OS X's Calculator application is something I basically ignore. Between Spotlight and Terminal's bc, I rarely if ever use it. So it was a pleasant and welcome surprise when TUAW reader Roberto Mateu gave us a heads up that Leopard's calculator was ...

Safari 3 AdBlock

by Mat Lu (Dec 10th, 2007)

I know some folks have been looking for an AdBlock plugin for Safari that works with Leopard's Safari v3. The excellent Pith Helmet ($10) is now Leopard compatible, but the relatively new Safari AdBlock is open source and free. It's pretty much ...