Fridayfavorite Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Friday Favorite: Type2Phone

by Erica Sadun (May 24th, 2013)

Type2Phone (US$4.99) is one of the most practical tools in my development toolbox. It emulates a Bluetooth keyboard from your Mac. With it, you type to your iOS device using your normal desktop keyboard. While this may not sound like a big thing for many iOS users -- after all, the onboard ...

Friday Favorite: CommandQ for Mac

by Matt Tinsley (Apr 26th, 2013)

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 ...

Friday Favorite: Sock Puppets

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 19th, 2013)

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 ...

Friday Favorite: Due

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 5th, 2013)

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 ...

Friday Favorite: Using AppleScript to work with tasks in Things 2

by Kelly Hodgkins (Feb 15th, 2013)

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 ...

Friday Favorite: Timehop traces your digital footsteps through the past

by Michael Rose (Jan 18th, 2013)

Human brains are funny things when it comes to time. We spend a lot of our mental energy thinking about the future -- where to vacation, what to eat, when to quit and who to marry -- but what really fires our synapses is a little taste of the past. The future may be awesome and mysterious, but we ...

Friday Favorite: Exif Everywhere reveals the data that's hidden in photos

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jan 4th, 2013)

Everyone enjoys a good photography-driven website, but folks with a technical eye can't look at an image without wondering what camera took that shot, what settings were used and where it was taken. Exif Everywhere from MyLove Company is a browser extension and desktop app that provides those ...

Friday Favorite: Voila captures your screen with ease, on sale now

by Mike Schramm (Oct 26th, 2012)

Given the issues with my former screen-capture app-of-choice Skitch, I recently went on the hunt for a replacement that can grab screenshots and handle video capture. I've finally landed on Voila. While it isn't perfect, Voila offers plenty of functionality and does almost everything I ...

Friday Favorite: Bartender

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Aug 31st, 2012)

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 ...

Friday Favorite: Desktop Tidy

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Aug 17th, 2012)

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 ...

Friday Favorite: A bushel of educational apps for learning fun

by Kelly Hodgkins (Mar 30th, 2012)

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 ...

Friday Favorite: Satechi 12-port USB Hub

by Michael Rose (Feb 24th, 2012)

It's rare to come up with a Friday Favorite for something as seemingly ho-hum as a USB hub, but this particular model caught my eye a while ago when a colleague brought it with him on a project. "What is that?" I asked, wonderingly. The blue glow of the ports was so hypnotic that I nearly missed ...

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 ...