Tool Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Daily iPhone App: VidRhythm

by Mike Schramm (Sep 8th, 2011)

When Harmonix (the makers of Rock Band and Dance Central) first announced it was creating a brand new iOS app, I was looking forward to a brand new music game of some kind. But the company surprised us all with VidRhythm, now available on the App Store for US$1.99. It's not really a game, really; ...

TUAW's Daily Mac App: Onyx

by Samuel Gibbs (Jul 11th, 2011)

Cleaning up a Mac is something many users never do, but if you want to squeeze all the performance and disk space you can out of your Mac, you need a tool like Onyx. A free multi-purpose utility, Onyx lets you run a myriad of system tasks such as disk maintenance, cache clean-up and index ...

GDC 2010: From concept to Top Paid with Unity iPhone

by Mike Schramm (Mar 9th, 2010)

Unity Technologies hosted the sponsored lunch panel during GDC 2010 today, and their "product evangelist" Tom Higgins gave a quick rundown of the software platform that enables developers to assemble and release games extremely quickly on multiple platforms. The company was actually founded in ...

WWDC Demo: MercuryMover and Highbrow

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Jun 25th, 2009)

If you prefer to keep your fingers on the keyboard and away from mice or trackpads, MercuryMover will allow you to do something simple: move and resize windows with the keyboard. There are a number of hotkeys for wiggling the windows into place, in 2 different increments, and a method of resizing ...

Apple ProRes QuickTime Decoder 1.0 for Mac and Windows

by Cory Bohon (Aug 28th, 2008)

Earlier tonight we saw the release of the ProRes Decoder tool for QuickTime. According to Apple, this tool will allow QuickTime to play Apple ProRes 422 files, using the codec that provides "visually lossless, uncompressed HD video at SD data rates" for Final Cut users. This is the first version of ...

iWriter - easily create study tools for the iPod, .Mac and the web

by David Chartier (Oct 22nd, 2006)

Yea that's right: I said 'study tools' and 'iPod' in the same sentence. iWriter is an interesting little app from Talking Panda that allows you to quickly build projects and study tools for easy viewing on an iPod or the internets. Projects can be uploaded to a .Mac account, and iWriter offers 8 ...

John Gruber releases BBColors 1.0

by David Chartier (Oct 9th, 2006)

John Gruber has released a command line tool called BBColors which allows BBEdit and TextWrangler users to save, reload and even share customized color schemes. BBEdit, like many code-friendly text editors, has offered a coloring system for some time, but it still doesn't allow users to save and ...

FileBrowse - a media browser companion for Finder

by David Chartier (Oct 6th, 2006)

Romain Guy at The Apple Blog has penned a nice walkthrough of an interesting new app called FileBrowse, which acts as more of a streamlined tool for media file browsing and manipulating tasks, as opposed to a full-fledged Finder replacement (cuz we all know how well that's going). FileBrowse makes ...

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom + Flickr Uploadr

by David Chartier (Oct 3rd, 2006)

Fraser Speirs already released a Flickr plugin for Aperture, but what about the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom users in the crowd (John Gruber has a nice piece on the ridiculousness of adding the 'Photoshop' prefix to Lightroom's name)? As it turns out, through a little trickery, Lightroom can be tweaked ...

iTunes song tagging redux

by David Chartier (Sep 30th, 2006)

We reported a method for tagging iTunes tracks and creating on-the-fly playlists way back in January. However, it involved using Quicksilver and a couple of home-grown scripts, but we can dig it if some of y'all aren't down with a tool as broad-reaching as Quicksilver. Fortunately for the rest of ...

An Adium Xtra for linking any browser's current page

by David Chartier (Sep 30th, 2006)

I know Adium can insert links from some browsers by itself, but I just found a script at the Adium Xtras site which offers much more fine-grained control over inserting a link from any browser, with the page name's descriptive title linked nice and clean, instead of the long ugly URL you get from ...

TUAW Tip: make friends with Mac OS X's Font and Color palettes

by David Chartier (Jul 17th, 2006)

One of the things I'm sure we all love about Mac OS X is how integrated so many of the apps and services are with each other, but did you know that integration can stem all the way down to the fonts and colors you use amongst your apps? In almost any input-based, Cocoa-written app you're running ...

Omni Group introduces OmniDazzle - "mesmerizing mouse movements"

by David Chartier (Jun 2nd, 2006)

After weeks of ambiguous hints and torturous teasing, The Omni Group has unveiled their newest product, and it definitely isn't a Sweedish meatball maker. Introducing: OmniDazzle, a "set of fun and useful enhancements that help you track the location of your mouse pointer and provide options for ...

Parallels Desktop Release Candidate 2, uh, released

by David Chartier (May 31st, 2006)

Get your mice clicking ladies and gentlemen, as Parallels has offered up the final test version of Parallels Desktop for Mac, their virtualization software that allows you to run almost any OS right within Mac OS X. With this version, however, Parallels has increased the app's final price to ...

QuarkXPpress 7 released, but not as a Universal

by David Chartier (May 23rd, 2006)

QuarkXPress 7 has hit the streets, but it oddly isn't a Universal Binary (Steve Jobs, if you remember, announced at January's Macworld event that Quark had a beta UB version available). A UB update to version 7 is reportedly going to be made available later this summer (I guess Adobe isn't the only ...