Mac How-Tos

Want to change internet browsers, but can’t imagine not having a Stumbleupon plugin? Stumbleupon, the popular Internet community that allows users to discover and rate websites, has various ways of being accessed. Users can connect to Stumbleupon through the service’s website along with Internet browser tools. Here are some tools that work with Stumbleupon.

1. Opera Stumbler is a third party plugin that allows Opera users to access StumbleUpon. Opera Stumbler is located in Opera’s menu bar  and offers all of the features Stumbleupon provides. This tool is free, and easy to install.

2. StumbleUpon for Firefox is a toolbar-based plugin for Firefox that lets you access the Stumbleupon community. This plugin allows you to stumble, send messages, rate pages and more. StumbleUpon for Firefox is free to download.

3. Stumbi for Safari is a lightweight plugin that is situated next to the back-forward buttons and Safari’s menu bar. This plugin gives you the ability to vote, send messages to friends and more. Stumbi costs $4, but you can download a free trial with 100 stumbles.

4. You can also access the Stumbleupon community on the service’s website. Stumbleupon offers a virtual toolbar that allows you to access all of the features that would be in a toolbar app. This method is great if you don’t want to deal with installing browser plugins.

- Alexander Garovi

Sometimes it’s nice to have a fully lit screen that doesn’t dim down. Lighthead’s Caffeine is the perfect solution to prevent your Mac from falling asleep. Caffeine is a tiny application that is situated in the menu bar. Simply click on the mug icon and your Mac will not start screen savers or dim the screen. You can also set a time limit from five minutes to two hours for Caffeine to run. Caffeine is definitely one of my favorite OS X apps and I highly recommend it to all Mac users. It’s a free download and can be found on the Free Apps page.

Caffeine allows you to set the amount of time it runs for

- Alexander Garovi

If you’re like me, you frequently monitor how much hard-disk space you have. Here are some useful disk monitoring applications that help you see what’s taking up disk space and easily delete applications.

Disk Inventory X is a disk monitoring application that allows you to see how much space your applications and other files take up. A column and color-coded tree map display the hard-disk space distribution.  The app is very easy to use, with a simple UI making it easy to view the status of your hard-disk. At startup, the app allows you to scan the Macintosh HD or other volumes, enabling you to  monitor Bootcamp partitions. Once a volume is selected, Disk Inventory X takes a couple of minutes to gather up information depending on the size of the volume.

AppCleaner is one of my personal favorite disk monitoring apps for OS X. AppCleaner is a simple drag-and-drop application that allows you to completely delete unwanted apps. By completely delete, I mean delete the application as well as its library files. Simply dragging applications from the Applications folder into the trash does not completely delete the application, leaving library .plist files behind. I highly recommend AppCleaner to anyone who wants to free up some hard-disk space.

OmniDiskSweeper is a mass file deleting utility that helps you get rid of many unwanted files at a time. The layout is pretty similar to Disk Inventory X, sorting your files by size in columns. At startup, the application asks you to select a volume. Simply select the unwanted files and click the delete button on the bottom of the window.

These applications can really be useful if you’re running low on disk space. They can be found in the “Free Apps” page. I Hope this is helpful.

- Alexander Garovi

If you want to block others from having access to your computer when you are away, you can simply hit Shift-Command-Option-Q to logout of your user. There are downsides to this – all of your open applications will quit. If you put your computer to sleep instead, running applications will stop and resume when the Mac wakes up. MacLoc is an alternative, allowing you to logout while still running applications.

MacLoc is a very simple application to use,  requiring just a few clicks to get working. When downloaded there are two MacLoc apps – One is the regular, dock based application and the other is MacLoc ME, the menubar-based icon. To activate MacLoc ME, simply click the menubar icon and select ‘Activate’.

After clicking on one of the MacLoc icons, you will logout. Your open applications will be right where you left them when you login. MacLoc is the perfect solution for busy environments, preventing others from using your Mac.

- Alexander Garovi

Since this is the first article I’ve written in the last couple of weeks, I thought I’d write about something new. Twitter, the micro-blogging service has numerous clients to update your twitter account. The two clients that I’m going to compare are Iconfactory’s Twitterific and Seesmic’s Twhirl. In order to compare the pros and cons of these clients, I’ve used a combination of both Twitterific and Twhirl over the past few weeks.

Twitterific is a menubar-based application that is relatively easy to use. One of the things I like most about Twitterific is its fantastic UI that sits above any other windows open, regardless of whichever window is selected. Twitterific can update your tweets at a minimum of 3 minutes, which can be quite slow. My biggest problem with Twitterific is the fact that there are constant “Twitter Errors” where the connection between Twitter and Twitterific times out. This can be very annoying and enough to drive one towards using an alternate client.

Twhirl is another twitter client that works well. It seems to update faster than Twitterific and not have nearly as many connection errors. However, the UI of Twhirl is not as attractive as Twitterific, not having a transparent appearance that sits above other windows. Twhirl also has a dock icon. The application is responsive and quite easy to use, available on both Windows XP and Vista.

The Twitter client battle comes down to this – do you want a great looking, menu-bar app that is easy to use, but takes a longer time to connect to Twitter, or do you want a simple application that updates faster and more frequently that is dock-based and doesn’t look as great. The choice is yours.

After comparing the two clients, I chose to stick with Twitterific. Despite the annoying error messages, I still prefer the UI of Twitterific over Twhirl and really like how it’s situated in the menu-bar.

- Alexander Garovi

Have a web page that you would like to add to your dock? Fluid allows you to do that. With Fluid you can create individual site specific browsers (SSBs) and run them as separate applications in your dock.  Each SSB created has a menu bar and desktop icon. Fluid is a very simple application, that’s easy to use.  I access my online Napster account with it, next to my iTunes. Here is how you can add a web page to your dock.

Open Fluid

Insert the information for the website you’d like to use. I used Facebook as my example.

Click ‘Create’ and the new application will appear on the Desktop, or whatever location you selected.

You can keep the application on your desktop or the folder of your choosing. I chose the Applications folder.

Now the SSB is running and can be seen on the dock.

- Alexander Garovi