Friday favorite Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Friday Favorite: Optimal Layout brings app switching and window controls to your fingertips

by TJ Luoma (Feb 3rd, 2012)

Optimal Layout is a great utility that fundamentally alters the way that I interact with my Mac. In short, it gives me the ability to use my keyboard to quickly change between windows. That might sound like what you're been doing with ⌘ + Tab, but there are a few important differences. The first ...

Friday Favorite: After the Deadline

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 20th, 2012)

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 ...

Friday Favorite: Lazarus Extension for Safari saves your form text

by Kelly Hodgkins (Dec 16th, 2011)

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 ...

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, though, it could be sending back information you'd ...

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, such as 7-Zip and RAR formats. While the ...

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, bringing them all together in a very cool way. The app ...

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, Ommwriter. Brett first mentioned the beta of Ommwriter ...

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 even thought of ".mp3" or ".mp4". In 1995 I acquired ...

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 control, or two-finger) clicked. If there are ...

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, SpamSieve installs as a plug-in to your mail client ...

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 (US$69) from Ambrosia Software. Snapz Pro X, ...

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 bulging. While installing Mac software is often as ...

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 version 2.0 of MainMenu, a collection of Mac ...

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, individual tastes and needs dictate which one ...

Friday Favorite Triple Pack: Alarm Clock 2, Apptrap, and TimeMachineEditor

by David Winograd (Jul 3rd, 2009)

When I consider what should really be system software, I always think of three little beauties that belong on every Mac: Alarm Clock 2, AppTrap and TimeMachineEditor. They are all one-trick-ponies, take up little space, are free for the downloading, and Apple should buy them up for Snow Leopard. ...