Tools Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

KisMAC dev calls it quits

by Mike Schramm (Jul 30th, 2007)

Reader Andrew dropped a note that Michael Rossberg, developer of KisMAC, the wireless network sniffer based on Kismet, has declared the project discontinued. I can't get the project's website to load (most likely because it's been Slashdotted), but apparently the reason Rossberg gave was that a ...

Typinator 2.0 35% off at MacZOT today only

by David Chartier (Jun 21st, 2007)

It hasn't even been two weeks since Typinator went 2.0, and now it's on a 35%-off sale at MacZOT for $12.99 (regular price: $19.99). This handy typing and snippet manager is a great tool for helping you work faster with text, and a deal this good is both rare and virtually impossible to beat. If ...

TUAW Tip: Preview has basic text, cropping and editing tools

by David Chartier (May 29th, 2007)

We sing the praises of plasq's fantastic private beta Skitch tool for making it dead simple to capture, edit and share screenshots with a good variety of online communities, but Mac OS X's own Preview app for viewing images and PDFs isn't without at least a couple of these basic tools. These ...

FlickrExport Lite for Aperture, new versions all around

by David Chartier (Apr 20th, 2007)

First there was FlickrExport for iPhoto, and it was good. Then its developer, Fraser Speirs, asked us whether we wanted him to make a FlickrExport for Aperture, and the answer to that question was also good. Now there is FlickrExport Lite for Aperture, and as a free product, it looks pretty sweet. ...

Another way for switchers to make new files

by Michael Rose (Mar 27th, 2007)

Regarding Mat's post on a cool QuickSilver-based approach to creating new files at high speed, a fair number of commenters -- and, it turns out, the original poster at lipidity.com -- made mention of NuFile, a combination contextual menu plugin and preference pane. One quick (free) download later, ...

Trampoline: the quickest route to the tools you need

by David Chartier (Feb 26th, 2007)

Application launchers are diversifying in big ways, and it's great to see the market expanding. After discovering LaunchBar then switching to Quicksilver, it was obvious how useful these apps are and how important it is that there be a wide variety of them. A new launcher I just found, called ...

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 ...

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 ...

Enable an advanced edit mode in iPhoto 6

by David Chartier (May 20th, 2006)

Rob Griffiths at Macworld has stumbled upon an advanced edit mode in iPhoto 6 that offers some advanced functions when using the Retouch or Red-Eye tools. When using either of these tools, you can hit ctrl-caps lock-9 (yes, I said caps lock) to switch on these specialized cursors that allow you to ...