Fridayfavorite Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Friday Favorites: Unit Converter

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Dec 2nd, 2011)

Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that we feel is indispensable. To me, Dashboard feels like the forgotten relative of OS X, the one that sits quietly in the back of the room during the family reunion that has ...

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. ...

Friday Favorite: Scrivener

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jun 26th, 2009)

Not long after I bought my first personal Mac in late 2004, I stumbled across an article that mentioned Ulysses, a text editor geared toward creative writers -- essentially the marriage between a word processor and project management software. It allows you to have all documents within a writing ...

Friday Favorite: TextEdit

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 17th, 2009)

What's free, flexible, easy-to-use but powerful and can handle a wide variety of file types? Our good friend, TextEdit, an app that ships with every Mac. TextEdit is, of course, a simple text editing tool like Notepad or WordPad on Windows. But there's a lot more to "simple text editing" that you ...

Friday Favorite: Woopra

by Dave Caolo (Apr 3rd, 2009)

A few months ago I was looking for an alternative to Google Analytics and found Woopra. It's still in beta so don't expect it to replace your current solution, but I'm having a lot fun using it on a few WordPress blogs. Setup is easy, if not a bit time consuming. First you've got to submit your ...