Category Archives: OSX

Apple did a pretty good job with OSX. You buy a new mac… and you get almost everything you need, ‘for free’. Any mac comes with iPhoto preinstalled, Mail, Calendar, Safari and even Garage Band. Basically it covers everything an average user needs to do.

There are really really few weak spots to OSX. I dare to say that… one of the few things OSX lacks is a nice widget to check out things such as the download speed… cpu load and temperature and even uptime. Good news is that there is a nice company called iSlayer, that has a reaaaaally cool Dashboard widget named ‘iStat‘ , which does exactly that.

It’s free… so you definitely don’t have an excuse not to download it. It has two modes: horizontal and vertical. You can tweak which indicators you want (and which ones you don’t want). Plus.. there is an iOS version, too. Go check it out!

I really don’t know if we’ll have file sharing services in… say… 5 years from now. Since megaupload has been taken down, and it’s CEO imprisoned, several other file sharing services have begun shutting down their services.

But many of them are still alive and kicking. So… whenever you need to download a huge amount of different files, manually entering the captchas (plus opening the links, one my one) turns into a tedious task.

That’s where jDownloader comes in. It’s a java based, multi platform app, which helps you download files form multiple sources. It has lots of plugins, and gets updated periodically. So chances are… it supports whatever filehosting service you’re using.

It has automatic captcha recognition (at least for several hostings). And if the hosting you’re using doesn’t have ‘auto-captcha-recog’, you’ll simply get a popup with the image itself.

It’s REALLY useful!

Google Chrome is definitely my favorite web browser. It has OSX Lion fullscreen support… it’s fast and lightweight, and Google itself is in charge of pushing it forward. But sometimes it just falls short… you just can’t find a suitable plugin for whatever you need to do. That’s the only reason i have firefox installed in my mac. Even the latest version of FF, release 11, doesn’t support OSX fullscreen feature.

So… let’s stop pointing out weak spots of this browser… and let’s go to the point!. The following plugins make my life easier. Really… so… i suggest you check them out.

1. Firebug
   Yes… it’s also available for Chrome. But this version has far more functionality than the google counterpart. It’s really useful when you’re developing websites…!
2. Video DownloadHelper
   Suppose you wanna download FLV files from whatever site you’re visiting. This is your friend!… it allows you to capture videos from a huge list of different websites.

I hope you find this helpful!

I’m not really the kind of person that recommends things. Good things stand out by themselves, and if it’s true that they’re good, they actually don’t need sponsorship.

But i feel like this app totally deserves a review. I’ve been using Google Reader for years. Somehow, i got used to its rusty interface. It’s true. A RSS reader doesn’t need to be fancy.. it should just work. But why not make it pretty?

That’s where Capuccino app comes in. It can be found in the Mac Appstore here. It’s free. The UI looks like Mail App for Lion. You get your feeds on the left column… a small column just to its right, and the actual post content to the right. Nice… right?.

Well.. hang in there. The best part of this RSS reader is that it sync’s with Google Reader. So, if you mark something as read in your macbook, it’ll get automatically reflected in your Reader account.

Why i think that this app is way better than NetNewsWire ?. Because it’s simple. It just gets to the point. Enter your credentials and read. Clean UI. Definitely Apple’s style.

Go get it!

I know. Real, old school devs.. use nothing but VI… or it’s enhanced incarnation, VIM. But maybe you don’t have the time to deal with a big learning curve. I don’t wanna memmorize obscure shortcuts, just to be considered ‘old school’.

That’s why i’ve been searching for a good html / javascript / php IDE for OSX. So far… i’ve played with few tools. What i was looking for is an integrated environment that allows you to upload your files… right there. That practically eliminates TextWrangler from the list.

TextWrangler is a free editor… available right there, in the Mac AppStore. It’s a great tool, however, it lacks ftp support!.

TextMate… is yet another (paid) tool. The UI looks nice.. and it just helps you get things done. But i liked CODA so much more, because of their UI, mostly. It has a cool navigation function that allows you go forward and backwards… preview, right there, and even SVN capabilities.

The only downside that CODA has is just a monetary one… it costs about 100 dollars. But i think it’s worth every penny…