lifehacker posts

SnowChecker will help you make the jump to Snow Leopard

by Steven Sande (RSS feed) on Nov 2nd, 2009

Most of us here at TUAW jumped aboard the Snow Leopard bandwagon immediately after receiving our upgrade disks -- and I mean immediately. We didn't bother to check out what apps would or wouldn't run, and could have cared less about compatibility with scanners and printers or anything else important like that. No, we just dived into the lake before determining whether or not it was shallow, full of piranhas, or contained hydrochloric acid. That's just us, though -- we like to be able to tell TUAW readers what to expect, good and bad, when a new OS version is delivered. Our friends at Download Squad, however, must still be a little queasy about making the leap, since they posted a quick app review today for SnowChecker.

SnowChecker is a free Mac application that does one thing -- it tells you whether or not your applications will run under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. SnowChecker performs a scan of your hard disk for apps, then compares the list of found apps against compatibility info stored at snowleopard.wikidot.com. It displays the the results, noting which apps are OK, which might have slight compatibility issues, and which will be totally hosed under Snow Leopard. SnowChecker uses a simple green, yellow, red color scheme to pass along the information to you, and often provides quick notes telling you about workarounds or updates that will help get all of your apps working smoothly.

If you're a bit on the shy side when it comes to doing upgrades, SnowChecker can make you feel a lot better about making the jump to Snow Leopard.

Tags: compatibility, download squad, DownloadSquad, lifehacker, snow leopard, snowchecker, SnowLeopard

Filed under: Cool tools, Freeware, Widget Watch, Deals

Widget Watch: Woot!

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Jan 31st, 2008

This Lifehacker comment thread made me go researching on what I might use for Webclips, but save for the front page of my favorite blog (TUAW, duh), I couldn't think of anything I'd really want to keep on my Dashboard 24/7. I did like the idea of putting Woot.com (and Shirt.woot, which I've been looking at a lot lately) on there, but as a few of the commenters say, webclipping (can I verb that?) the entire page makes things a little too big.

Fortunately, David Elliot piped up about the Woot.com widget, which easily and quickly lets you monitor the Woot sites from your dashboard, with a minimum of space taken up. And now I've got two instances of it running on my Dashboard, one for regular Woot and one for the Shirt version. I especially like that it includes Growl notification, too -- if I happen to be working around midnight and a really good deal pops up, I won't miss it.

Of course, you may not want to have something popping up on your Dashboard all the time tempting you to spend money. But if you're already following the Woot empire (and to tell the truth, I almost never buy anything-- I just like looking), the widget is an easy and simple way to stay up to date.

Tags: dashboard, lifehacker, shirt.woot, webclips, widget-watch, widgets, woot

Filed under: Software, Tips and tricks

Quickly relaunch an app with Quicksilver

by Dave Caolo (RSS feed) on Apr 19th, 2007

That's it, Quicksilver is officially The Handiest Utility Ever. This great tip from Lifehacker explains how you can use Quicksilver to quickly relaunch an application that has - *ahem*- unexpectedly frozen. Simply call up Quicksilver, find the target application, tab over to the action pane, type "relaunch," hit return and blammo! The errant app gets a kick in the seat. Thanks, Quicksilver!

Tags: lifehacker, quicksilver, relaunch, tips

Filed under: iTS, Tips and tricks, iTunes

Organize your PDFs with iTunes

by Dave Caolo (RSS feed) on Mar 7th, 2007

There's a great tip on Lifehacker today about using iTunes as an organizational tool. We've all got lots of PDFs sitting around; some important, some not. Instead of burying them in a series of nested folders within your Documents folder, use iTunes.

Make playlists for your different categories (like "Taxes" or "Parenting Committee"), add your files and you're done! Drop the lot into a "PDFs" folder and you've got organized, search-able files in an application you've probably got running anyway.

If you want to take this a step further, follow the full tutorial at Lifehacker and create a PDF-only iTunes library.

Tags: itunes, lifehacker, pdf

Filed under: iPod Family, Software, Freeware, iTunes

Manage your iPod sans iTunes with Floola

by Mat Lu (RSS feed) on Feb 20th, 2007

Adam Pash over at lifehacker has a great post up on managing your iPod without iTunes. The post focuses on cross-platform tools for adding music and video to your iPod from practically any computer, the most interesting of which is Floola. Floola has a bunch of features, allowing you to copy music (in both directions), manage playlists, podcasts, etc. Best of all, Floola can be installed on your iPod (you must enable disk usage to run Floola), so you can run it on any computer you happen to have access to (including, if you are rather unfortunate, a Windows PC) directly from the iPod. In addition to Floola, Adam also mentions running myPodder, again directly from your iPod, to manage your podcast subscriptions, as well as some Windows specific tools. I'm not quite ready to give up iTunes just yet, but if you carry an iPod back and forth between two computers, as I do, Adam definitely has some good suggestions.

Floola is a free download, but donations are requested. myPodder is also a free download, but you must register with podcastready in order to use it.

Tags: floola, ipod, itunes, lifehacker, mypodder

Filed under: Cult of Mac, PowerBook, Apple

Found Footage: Laser etching a PowerBook

by Scott McNulty (RSS feed) on Aug 30th, 2006

Gina over at Lifehacker got her PowerBook etched with a Celtic knot, and she had the wherewithal to capture the process with her cameraphone. The video isn't that great, but head on over to Lifehacker to check out some photos of the finished product.

Tags: foo, laser etching, LaserEtching, lifehacker

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, OS, Apple

Vista very OS X like

by Scott McNulty (RSS feed) on Jun 13th, 2006

Our good friends at Lifehacker installed the latest beta of Windows Vista and experienced deja vu. Where had they seen these UI elements before? A focus on search? Gadgets?

Oh, right, OS X. Check out the full post for a side by side look at some OS X like features of Vista.

Personally, I hope that Microsoft comes up with some really sweet new features in Vista to give Apple a run for their money (competition is good for the consumer).

Tags: lifehacker, vista, windows vista, WindowsVista

Filed under: OS, How-tos, Internet, Internet Tools

IP over FireWire tutorial

by Scott McNulty (RSS feed) on May 18th, 2006

We all know that FireWire is fast (like super fast) but did you know that it can also handle networking (and that is fast too)? Well, it can!

I know what you're thinking: if only there was some sort of tutorial that would show me how to setup a IP over FireWire connection from a PC to a Mac! Those wacky folks at LifeHacker has cooked one up and it is pretty rad (people still say that, right?).

Tags: ip over firewire, IpOverFirewire, lifehacker

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