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30 Free System Tools for a Better Mac

2009-07-08T14:00:00Z

It's not an easy task to maintain our Mac system clean, healthy, and appealing with just relying on built-in applications. We will end up scratching our head just to delete some unnecessary binary files to clean our disk.

Therefore, we all here decided to make a good compilation of free system tools for Mac. With many varieties of applications, from system cleaner to system tweaker, from data organizer to system display manager, we have those all collected in this article.

Click on the application title to get to application homepage.

Internet Updater

AppFresh

If you want to keep all of our applications, widgets or preference panes up to date, you will definitely need AppFresh. AppFresh shows all information on application updates on one single easy-to-use window.

System Notification

Growl

Growl is a system notification tools. Growl allows applications with Growl support to send notification on any updates made.

System Monitoring
iStat Pro, iStat Menus, WhatLCD

iStat Pro

iStat pro is a highly configurable widget that lets you monitor every aspect of your Mac, including CPU, memory, disks, network, battery, temperatures, fans, load & uptime and processes. iStat pro can do it all.

iStat Menus

With 8 separate and highly configurable menu extras, iStat menus will let you know exactly what’s going on inside the system of your Mac. These menu extras can be used to monitor : CPU, Memory, Drives, Network, Temps, Fans & Power, Bluetooth, and Date & Time.

WhatLCD

WhatLCD is a convenient way for user to see what kind of LCD they have in their Mac. Simply put it, WhatLCD just executes the command to query the information from the system and displays it to the end user.

System Maintenance & Cleaning
MainMenu, iBackup, Preference Cleaner, Permissions Reset

MainMenu

MainMenu is a system maintenance tools to maintain your Mac in its good condition. With a slick and simple interface, MainMenu helps us in improving application performance, searching faster and increasing the speed of disk access. All that and more is just two clicks.

iBackup

iBackup supports scheduled backups of files, folders and applications. Furthermore, it uses plugins to backup your settings like the dock, desktop picture, time, firewall, bluetooth and other system preferences. It is also able to backup Application Settings.

Preference Cleaner

Preference files can become corrupt and cause an application to become unstable. Alternatively, if an application has a large array of preferences you might find it simpler to delete the files than to locate a setting which has enabled an undesired behaviour.

PreferenceCleaner is a utility which aims to simplify the task of deleting preference files.

Permissions Reset

Permissions Reset is simple, free application developed to solve one of the most annoying problems with Mac OS X computers, Permissions problems, such as not being to save your own work into your Documents folder and not being able to update files that others have sent you.

System Tweak
smcFanControl, Secrets, Lab Tick, etc

smcFanControl

smcFanControl lets you control your fan power with a preferences pane right from your menubar. Though this application isn't compatible for some of the Macs, but if you can use it for your Mac, it will be very useful to cool down your hot Mac.

Secrets

Secrets is a simple Preferences Pane to unveil all the hidden settings of your Mac.

Lab Tick

If you've been annoyed by your Mac's backlit keyboard, which you don't a control on, you can use Lab Tick. Lab Tick can be used to control the luminosity of your backlit keyboard.

iTool

Download Page: Link

iTool is a free multifunction utility for a complete system maintenance and cleaning. Its GUI will help you choose quickly the needed task. Not only maintains system healthy, iTool also lets us tweak hidden functions of our Leopard system.

DejaMenu

DejaMenu will display the current application's main menu as a context menu when a key combination is pressed. For lazy-mouse users, by using DejaMenu we can save the travel time of our mouse to menubar, because the menu is just in the tip of the pointer upon pressing key combo.

Screeni

Screeni is a free Mac applet which allows you to display your screensaver as your desktop background!

However, as screensaver might take quite amount of CPU resource, it's better to use one of these low-resource screensavers: Computer Name, Flurry, Spectrum, or Changing Pictures.

Or maybe you want to try with another screensavers, we have a good compilation of forty+ free screensavers, feel free to take a look.

Dock Spaces

Dock Spaces is a tiny application that allows you to have up to 10 different docks and swap anytime you want from the menu bar.

System Display
Hide Folders, Menu Eclipse, HotBox, etc

Hide Folders

Hide Folders is a freeware program for Mac OS X dedicated to protect documents and folders. With a click, we can conceal files and folders with all their contents. It's simple to use this application. And with this, you can avoid your important files being modified, seen or erased by others.

Menu Eclipse

Upon activation, Menu Eclipse will add the layer of transparent gray to avoid distraction from menubar and also avoid burn on that part of LCD.

HotBox

HotBox is a background application that allows you to make anything on screen full screen! Just press a keystroke and drag a box around whatever you want, and it'll fill your entire monitor.

The usage is really simple, upon pressing keystrokes, a crosshair cursor will appear and you should select a region with that. And the result is: the region of your choice will be zoomed to full screen. HotBox is most suitable for watching video or flash.

MagiCal

MagiCal is a FREE menu-based clock and calendar. It features a huge range of configuration options for how the time and date are displayed, and can operate either in conjunction with, or as a replacement for the built in system menu clock.

In addition to this, MagiCal features a handy drop-down calendar that can be torn off and placed anywhere on screen.

Screen Shade

ScreenShade is a tool for further dimming a screen (or screens) past the capabilities of the OS X brightness display settings. This utility is especially useful for people who find themselves using their computer in a low-lighting situation.

Data Organizer
File Actions, The Unarchiver, SyncTwoFolders, etc

File Actions

A small, one-trick app that moves files from one place to another automatically to keep your computer organized and clutter free.

Running through a set of user defined rules at regular intervals, File Actions will find misplaced files and automatically move the file to a new home. Its the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to keep yourself organized!

The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for "BOMArchiveHelper.app", the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X.

Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more or less obscure formats.

SyncTwoFolders

SyncTwoFolders simply synchronizes two folders.

I feel that this application will be particularly useful if you have two different accounts, where you can synchronize the content of two folder (usually User Desktop).

XShelf

You can drag files or folders from Finder into the shelf and they will sit there until you drag them out. Once you drag them out, the drag operation will finish as if XShelf were never involved. You may drag individual or multiple files or folders, as well as text clippings and URLs to XShelf.

With XShelf, you no longer have to shuffle windows so that both the source and target of a drag and drop are onscreen at the same time.

Permanent Eraser

When you delete your files, Permanent Eraser provides an even stronger level of security by implementing the Gutmann Method. This utility overwrites your data thirty-five times, scrambles the original file name, and truncates the file size to nothing before Permanent Eraser finally unlinks it from the system.

Once your data has been erased, it can no longer be read through traditional means.

DMG Canvas

DMG Canvas builds disk images from template documents that you create. Simply design your disk image's appearance using the graphical editor and click Build.

iDMG

iDMG is an easy to use application to create DMG files of a folder with a simple drag and drop. It supports encryption, various file systems, permissions and AES128 or AES256 encryption.

SnapNDrag

SnapNDrag lets you take a screenshot by just clicking a button and dragging off the resulting screenshot.

NameChanger

NameChanger is designed for the sole purpose of renaming a list of files. This is the solution for free batch renamer application!

Daily Trick 6. Toolbar View

2009-07-08T11:00:00Z

After using Mac for quite some time, I believe we all have made use of our Finder toolbar. Many things can be done to our Finder toolbar, such as sticking application to toolbar for quick launch and dropping simple AppleScript.

Apart from those functions, everyone has different taste for how the icons should appear on the toolbar.

Be it like normal icon, text icon, or icon with text, we can easily change it by performing Cmd-Click on the pill button (top-right).

FYI. Cmd → Command

For more toolbar tricks, you can read our previous article about finder toolbar tricks:
[1] Finder Tweaks 1: The Toolbar
[2] Finder Tweaks 2: Extra Toolbar Items

Daily Trick 5. Clean Desktop

2009-07-07T11:00:00Z

After using Mac for quite some time, our desktop will surely cluttered with many files. Those icons make your desktop uglier and slow down the system.

Usually, people will suggest you to delete those items on the desktop or move them somewhere else. However, we can always use this terminal code to hide all desktop items:
chflags hidden ~/Desktop/*

And to reveal it again, we can use terminal code:
chflags nohidden ~/Desktop/*

But for those people who are not familiar in using Terminal, we can always use Camouflage for Mac.

Using Camouflage, with just a click away you can hide/show your icons.

And what's best is that, you can grab this application for free.

Finally, you will get the cleanest desktop ever. Make sure you grab some gorgeous walls from our previous wallpaper compilation to even beautify your clean Mac desktop.

Winners of CleanMyMac Giveaway

2009-07-06T14:00:00Z

Many thanks to everyone who has participated in the giveaway to try out luck in winning one free CleanMyMac from MacPaw.

Regardless of the order, here are the five lucky winners we have:

Vinicius
“ Tried several uninstallers and cleaning utilities for macs, but CleanMyMac really blows the competition … ”
Aaron
“ … The user-interface it great. It's so simple! … ”
GSquared
“ … It's as easy as pushing one button. BAM! Clean! ”
Kaspth
“ … This is one of the applications that truly deserves the tagline, Apple gives its products: "It Just Works". ”
Gabriel Everett
“ … I'm a student so I'm a freeware addict, and I simply can't afford to pay for cleaning up computers. … ”

License codes are on their way, should reach their places soon!

Daily Tricks 4. Eternal History

2009-07-06T11:00:00Z

After using Safari for quite some time, it will be normal for us to have visit many sites and pages. All of those are tracked and saved in our history.

Perhaps after a year or more, we will forget some of useful sites and want to find it. At that time, we can use our history to trackback.

If you are using Firefox as web browser, you can have your eternal history by following these steps:

Open Firefox and go to its Preferences
Under Preferences Pane, choose Privacy Section
Take a look at the first check box labelled "Keep my history for at least … days". You can fill any large numbers here, e.g. 99999.
And your history files will remain there for that written days, practically eternal

On the other hand, if you want to make your history only lasts for 1 day, you can simply change the number to 1.

For Safari, the setting is under Safari Menubar → Preferences → General Section.

Get the Most out of Adium

2009-07-04T14:00:00Z

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.

Most of Mac users have known the existence of this instant messaging client. And today, I would like to reveal some of the nifty tricks while using Adium to get the most out of Adium, such as inserting line break, changing nickname, updating Twitter with Adium, and many others.

Don't forget to leave your comment or feedback.

Switch Between Tabs

When chatting with many of your friends, this will be definitely the case: our hands will be too lazy to reach the mouse and click on the tab. That's when switching tabs using keyboard shortcut will come in handy.

Command-← or Command-→ to move to previous or next tab
Command-1, Command-2, … , Command-0 to move to the n-th tab

These shortcuts can also be seen under Adium Menubar: Window.

Apply New Theme

Seeing old theme would surely someday make you feel bored. It will be better if you've wider range of choices. You can find some gorgeous themes at AdiumXtras Message Styles.

Ravenant by Collin Henderson is my favorite until now (shown above).

Other themes/message styles that are worth looking:

Modern by Joshua Bryant
ProtoScroll by Eoban Binder
Ethereal by Adam Henson
Blackened by Andreas Lanjerud
Candywrapper by Therealloon
Simply Smooth by Aqueous
Succinct by David ZKL
PurePlastics by Peter Simonsson

Which one is your favorite theme?

Insert Line Break

Unlike typing with text editor, message will be sent upon hitting the Return key. Usually, some Adium users will advice you to use keystrokes Option-Return.

However, it's quite troublesome if we often use line break for our message. Therefore, we need a bit of workaround for this, which is done by assigning enter key (the one next to the right-hand Command key) to produce a line break.

Here is how to do it.

Open Adium Menubar: Adium → Preferences…
Go to General section
Look for the option box labelled "Send messages with"
Change the assigned key to Return key only

Change Nickname

By default, the nickname of your Adium will follow your username. If you want to change it, you can go under Adium Preferences → Personal Section.

Just recently, I found a much faster way:

Open your Adium Contact List (Command-/)
Double-click on your nickname and you will see it's now highlighted
Type in your new nickname and hit Return key to confirm

Show Unread Message Count

When chatting with many of your friends, it will be really helpful to display unread message count of every tabs.

Follow these steps to achieve that.

Open Adium Preferences (huh, again?)
Go under Advanced Section and choose categories (from sidebar) Messages
Inside you can change many settings including the checkbox
Show unread message count in tabs

Killer Plugins

With easy-to-install additional plugins, you will even fill your Mac day with Adium-ing. Clicking on the title will bring you to the download page.

Contact Album

Developer: Dustin Brewer

This plugins, after the installation, will store all icons that your contacts use over time and comes with a viewer for the icons.

Adium Time Zone

Developer: Jürgen Kreileder

This plugin adds time zone functionality to Adium by letting you specify a time zone for each contact. You will then be able to see their local time in the tooltip when you hover over them.

TwitterIM

Developer: Patrick Gibson

Only works on Adium 1.3.4.

TwitterIM allows users to send and receive Tweets in a normal Adium IM window. While waiting for the release of Twitter integration with Adium in the later version of Adium 1.4, why don't we use this plugin first?

To set up TwitterIM, just go to Adium Menubar: File → Add Account → microblog-Twitter and fill in your Twitter account information. If you can't find microblog-Twitter, it means that you have used the incompatible version of Adium.

Connect to Facebook

If you've a Facebook account, it's so advisable for you to chat with your Facebook friends using Adium (Yes, Adium also supports chatting with Facebook account. Cool!).

The setting up is so easy: Go to Adium Menubar: File → Add Account → Facebook and fill in your Facebook login information.

Other Settings

Those settings mentioned above are often changed. But of course, to suit your taste and convenience, there are more preferences and settings that can be changed inside Adium Preferences.

Some settings that may be of your interest:

Change the number of recent messages in new tab → General Section
Set timeout for inactivity time to change status accordingly → Status Section
Add/remove actions for certain event → Events Section
Enable automatic receival of file transfer → File Transfer Section
Open chats as soon as contacts begin typing → Advanced Section · Messages

Lastly

There is a chance that we will miss some interesting tricks here. If you've got any killer tricks regarding to Adium, you can share it on the comment box provided, we really appreciate it.

Daily Trick 3. Quick Look Zoom

2009-07-04T11:00:00Z

Quick Look usually scales down big images to suit the screen resolution. Because of this, we may lose some details of the image while we observed it in Quick Look mode.

Some people maybe suggest using Full Screen Mode, but that's not solving the problem for images with higher dimension than our screen resolution.

The ideal solution is to use Quick Look Zoom that is achieved by pressing (and holding down) Option key and you will see the cursor change to a magnifier icon. After the zooming, you will be able to drag the image around.

Zooming in effect:
[1] Normal View
[2] Zoom View

For zooming out, use Shift-Opt with mouse-click(s).

This trick only works on image files. If you want to zoom in/out PDFs, you can simply use Cmd-[+] or Cmd-[-].

MacBook Spaceship

2009-07-03T14:00:00Z

A French guy is using his MacBook when it suddenly transforms into a MacBook Spaceship.

Let's watch and be amazed by this new MacBook technology.

Source: LiveLeak - MacBook Transform

Daily Trick 2. Total Darkness

2009-07-03T11:00:00Z

Usually, in order to adjust the brightness of our Mac to 0%, we will press and hold the function button all the way until the light from our Mac is gone. And I am not satisfied with this usual stuff as it's not giving me immediate darkness to my Mac.

I've mentioned this trick somewhere in previous articles, we can use single keystrokes to get total darkness of our Mac.

0% Brightness

Shortcut: Ctrl-Shift-Eject.

This will sleep only the display without turning your Mac into sleep mode.

And this saves more battery power compared to turning on screen saver.

Daily Trick 1. Shut Down

2009-07-02T11:00:00Z

Some new Mac users, without knowing the existence of universal shortcut to directly shut down their Mac, would go for the menu bar, search for the apple logo, choose the option, and confirm from the prompted dialog box.

All of these hassles can be replaced with keystrokes:
Cmd-Opt-Ctrl-Eject.

The same applies for restart, only single keystrokes needed:
Cmd-Ctrl-Eject.

And to put the computer to sleep: Cmd-Opt-Eject.

Note. These shortcuts, except for restart, will take the action immediately without prompting dialog box asking for confirmation. Make sure you save all your works beforehand.

100+ Elegant & Artistic Wallpapers

2009-07-01T14:00:00Z

Wallpapers can be creative, elegant, and refreshing. If you are looking to add some awesomeness to your Mac, you probably need a desktop wallpaper that decorates your Mac to create something that matches the elegance of Mac.

In this post we present mind-blowing desktop wallpapers related fantasy art, light stream, and color spectrum themse. All screenshots are clickable and lead to the pages where they can be downloaded.

They are definitely worth a look!

Desktopography

Artist: Alexander Radsby

Loading

Artist: Rami A. Shaqdeeh

Duality

Artist: Alexander Radsby

Explosion of Light

Artist: Unknown

The Dancing Nebula

Artist: Casperium

Aurora Borealis

Artist: Jakub Nowaczyk

Nucleus

Artist: Till Nowak

Junio

Artist: Patricia V. Soy

Septiembre

Artist: Patricia V. Soy

Glacier Sunrise

Artist: Matt Li

Drustan's Nebula

Artist: Casperium

Stabilis

Artist: Jason Benjamin

Earthenibex

Artist: Rico Sta. Cruz

Wallpapers Planet

Artist: Daniel

Conspired and Contrived

Artist: Riyah

Demetrium Vitae

Artist: Max Last

Earth HD

Artist: Unknown

Stardust

Artist: Vitaly S. Alexius

Soccer Player

Artist: Nick La

Bokeh

Artist: Javier Ocasio

Experiment Wall

Artist: Unknown

Aurora

Artist: Piotr Karwowski

Serenity

Artist: Lars Nikander Frandsen

Chwant W

Artist: Lars Nikander Frandsen

The Bello Nebula

Artist: Casperium

Rising Sun

Artist: Dmitry

Fly to the Sky

Artist: Dmitry

City 2.0

Artist: Daniel

Enchanted Forest

Artist: Alexander Radsby

Expiatory Temple

Artist: George Grie

Labyrinth

Artist: Ziv Qual

Ghost Ship: Full Moon Rising

Artist: George Grie

Final Frontier

Artist: George Grie

Stormy Weather

Artist: Richard Mohler

Space Coast

Artist: Dmitry

Fires of Heaven

Artist: Orikon

Fall of the Autumn

Artist: Kenpunk 79

World, It's Magenta and Cyan

Artist: Dmitry

Yet Another Space

Artist: Eric Cartman

Chaos Ingens

Artist: Josef Barton

Fenix White April

Artist: Dmitry

Quattuor Simplex

Artist: Javier Ocasio

In a Whisper

Artist: Andrew

Age is Beauty

Artist: Sirakos

Colorswing

Artist: Mal93

The Moment

Artist: Matthew Johnson

MacBook Pro

Artist: Rheza Pahlevi

La Solitudine

Artist: Wendy

For a Thousand Years

Artist: Mikk Metsniit

Nova

Artist: Casperium

Let It Fly

Artist: Gustavo

Eternity of Beauty

Artist: Katie Caterpillar

Refluxation

Artist: Ange S.

Lady Gaga

Artist: Ange S.

Hardkandi

Artist: Ange S.

Phalanx

Artist: Tobias Roetsch

R.O.F. Nebula

Artist: Casperium

Blue Nexus

Artist: Casperium

Flowers House

Artist: Daniel

Terra Dream

Artist: P. Kleiner

Science Fiction

Artist: C. Gerber

Galileo

Artist: Josef Barton

Arrival

Artist: Josef Barton

Space Lighthouse

Artist: Mariusz Karasiewicz

Hundred Percent

Artist: Studio83

Rainbow

Artist: Eric Design

Reflux

Artist: Ange S.

Horizon

Artist: Hameed

Epic

Artist: Casperium

Balloon

Artist: Mal93

Space Travel

Artist: Max

Nebular

Artist: James Dolan

Horotard

Artist: Thorez Clément

Mutation

Artist: Thorez Clément

Shock Alpha

Artist: Thorez Clément

Grunge Rainbow

Artist: Konstantino

Blaze of Light

Artist: Oliver Twardowski

Lazer

Artist: Thorez Clément

Words by Words

Artist: Thorez Clément

Plasma

Artist: Thorez Clément

Journeyman Die

Artist: Josef Barton

Lifestream

Artist: Patrick Ahmann

Afternoon Shadows

Artist: Richard Mohler

Out in the Fields

Artist: RevDesktop

Blue Earth

Artist: Unknown

Asteroid Belt

Artist: Unknown

Aurora Aquantic

Artist: Filipe

Frozen Galaxy

Artist: Dlinx

Dreamy Scene

Artist: Spartan372

Hope

Artist: Studio83

City on the Brink

Artist: Allen

Your Choice is Your Way

Artist: Alexander Osokin

The Temple of Music

Artist: Alexander Osokin

Absolute Power of Nature

Artist: Alexander Osokin

Dreamlake

Artist: Alexander Osokin

Magic Valley

Artist: Unknown

Lakeside

Artist: Mark K.

Offensive of the Winter

Artist: Alexander Osokin

Core Worlds

Artist: Alexander Osokin

Decampment

Artist: Tobias Roestch

Strange World VII

Artist: Javier Ocasio

Floating Island

Artist: Javier Ocasio

White Night

Artist: Javier Ocasio

Run Away Together

Artist: Marwia

It Was a Beautiful Day

Artist: Javier Ocasio

Earth: The End

Artist: Tobias Roetsch

Pieces of Life

Artist: Luuk Vermeyden

Freedom

Artist: Daniel

Thanks to UsingMac Sponsors

2009-06-30T14:00:00Z

We would like to shout a big thank you for our sponsors. They've done a great task in enriching our Mac life. You can purchase an adspot on UsingMac through BuySellAds.

CleanMyMac

CleanMyMac helps you in cleaning up useless system files that pile up and waste your precious disk space.

Keynote Quartet FX

A set of great presentation-making tools that can make your presentation memorable and mind-blowing!

Many new tweaks, free applications, wallpapers, and giveaways are coming! Make sure you come back often~

Giveaway: (5x) CleanMyMac from MacPaw

2009-06-22T13:00:00Z

Upon installation of application, some system files are spread across your Mac without your knowing that. Even after uninstallation, those persistent files are leaved behind, eating up your free space.

Several third party apps are available to clean up these leftovers; CleanMyMac is one of those. And this time, we are giving away 5x CleanMyMac as courtesy of MacPaw.

What's CleanMyMac

CleanMyMac is a system utility that cleans unneeded files. It will help slim universal binaries, clean logs, cache, and leftovers from uninstallation of applications and remove unneeded languages. Basically, it slims down your disk usage.

Some of the reasons you will want to use CleanMyMac:

Easy to use, user-friendly interface with drag and drop nature
Able to removes useless language translations
Quick and secure file eraser
Able to clean up leftover from previously removed applications and widgets

Useful Links

Here are useful links for more information about CleanMyMac:

How to Win

In order to win one of these CleanMyMac licenses. Here's what you should do:

Check out CleanMyMac here
Tell us why you will (or will not) like CleanMyMac, in comment box provided

5 commentators with the best answers will be able to walk away with a CleanMyMac. Contest will be closed next Monday, 29th June 2009. Good luck, folks!

20+ Free Productivity Booster Apps for Mac

2009-06-19T13:00:00Z

Lacking of productivity applications will slow down our workflow and consume more time, even though we've already purchased a Mac. Using only built-in Mac applications, we can neither get the most out of our Mac nor boost our productivity.

In this article, we've compiled several free applications for Mac OS X (including application launcher, easy note-taker application, data backup tool, data sharing utility, etc) that can significantly boost your productivity.

Let us know which one is your favorite!

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is a super fast application launcher empowered with many time-saving actions. The moment you get used to Quicksilver, you won't think of any other application launchers.

Think

Think is a light application that lets you fully focus on your work. By forcing you to concentrate only on one active application, Think improves your concentration and hence boosts your productivity.

Cashbox

Cashbox is a personal finance application for Mac OS X designed to make managing your personal finances a breeze. Cashbox was designed to be a quick and simple to use application for managing personal finances.

Anxiety

Anxiety is a super-lightweight to-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. Its sleek and simple user interface won't affect your workflow thus increasing your productivity.

Sidenote

Sidenote tries to catch the "Stickies" spirit but in the form of a multi-document drawer that will hide in the corner of your screen (left or right). You can use it to take all your daily notes, include images and easily modify text color and font.

Growl

Growl is a Mac OS X applications that unintrusively notifies you when something happens.

SketchBox

SketchBox is a Sticky Notes Managerr for your Mac. SketchBox enables you to enter text, make drawings, and set reminders for each sticky notes.

Name Mangler

Name Mangler is a batch file renamer application, which supports several renaming tasks, such as Find & Replace (with or without regular expression), Number Sequential, Set Extension, and many others common batch renaming functions.

Appointments

Appointments is an application that can assist in keeping record of customers, contact persons, and important events. Appointments save the information in several separated dictionaries to provide higher convenience in user interface, like sorting and filtering of data.

FreeMind

FreeMind is a free mind-mapping application written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. Using FreeMind, you can map your ideas to a more solid state, i.e. a mind map.

iClockr

iClockr is a simple Mac application that helps you in tracking your time. With iClockr, it's very easy to calculate total time used to finish a certain project.

iTunes Alarm

This iTunes utility turns your Mac into alarm clock. It'll gently put you to sleep then quietly do the same for your Mac. When its time to wake up, it'll wake the computer first, and then rouse you from your slumber with music of your choice.

SnapNDrag

SnapNDrag is an application that has its own clipboard. By simply clicking on SnapNDrag button, the screenshot is saved into SnapNDrag clipboard and can be dragged anywhere you want.

SnapNDrag also supports multiple file formats for saving wider range of image quality and for supporting variety of screenshots.

Mojo

Mojo is a music sharing application. It lets you browse, select, and download music from other Mojo users that can be found within the same network.

The free version of Mojo limits the number of internet buddies, but doesn't have any usage limitations (great news, folks!).

Maybe you feel that Mojo doesn't have any relation with productivity, but for me, Mojo has saved me a lot of time on searching for music that my friends have.

EverSave

EverSave allows saving of all documents in a specific time interval or by changing frontmost application thus avoiding data loss during application crash.

The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver is an archive unpacker application for Mac OS X, which is designed to handle more formats than built-in BOMArchiveHelper.

The Unarchiver supports filenames with foreign character sets and also supports files created with non-English versions of other operating systems.

Service Scrubber

Service Scrubber is a free application for Mac OS X that helps you in arranging available services of your Mac. With Service Scrubber, you can restructure, change keyboard shortcut, and disable/enable services.

With modified services menu, your productivity will be significantly improved.

Burn

Using Burn, you can easily burn your files to a disc, choose different filesystems to share the file with, and for burning Audio CD, Burn offers MP3 tag editing to personalize your disc.

iBackup

iBackup supports scheduled backups of files, folders, and applications. Furthermore, iBackup uses plugins to backup application settings, reducing the hassle of tweaking the Mac all over again.

AppCleaner

AppCleaner is a small application that allows you to uninstall unwanted apps. AppCleaner unveils many related application files that are distributed in the System and deletes those small files during application removal.

Folx Downloader

Folx is a free downloader for Mac OS X. Folx can download files of any size via HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP. With the technology of multi-threading tasks, Folx can give maximum download speed.

Folx is still in its beta version. Hope that it's still free after the release of its official version.

Dropbox

With Dropbox, you can share your files online and across computers. If you're working with several people, Dropbox can save your time in distributing your documents as well as in backing up important files.

The free version of Dropbox can support up to 2GB of data storage, which is already quite big for normal usage.

Snippely

Snippely is a basic text and code organizational Adobe AIR Application. Snippely has a nice user interface, suitable for storing bits of code, quick notes and memos, thus avoiding cluttering your hard drives with scattered "snippets".

Perhaps you've discovered other productivity applications, mind sharing with us?

Recording Speech with GarageBand 2009

2009-06-18T14:00:00Z

After burning some time to play around with GarageBand 2009, I got a new skill to share with you all in this article: recording speech.

Although it sounds simple, there are many hidden tricks to get clean and nice recorded speech. Hope this article can help you in your future speech recording.

Switching to Audio Line-In Port

By using Audio Line-In Port, you will be able to record the sound right from the microphone, reducing most of noise from environment.

Here are the steps to switch to line-in port:

Open System Preferences…
Click on the speaker icon to go inside Sound Preferences Pane
Choose the Input tab and switch the device for sound input to Line In
You can check the changes by connecting microphone to your Mac and observe the input level (sound will be taken in only if you speak to the mic)

Recording with GarageBand

Upon launching GarageBand, you will be asked to choose what type of recording you want to make. In the case of recording speech, choosing Voice from the menu will be the most suitable.

Since we are not going to record a song, you can choose anything for the tempo.

After going into the Editor Window, these things are essential to record speech with GarageBand (instead of recording song):

Turn off Metronome (command-u)

Switch to record with No Effects from Track Info Pane on the right side of the window

Change Input Source accordingly. For my MacBook, it's Mono 1 (Built-in Input)

Enable Automatic Level Control by ticking the checkbox
Display Timer in LCD instead of Measures by choosing Control → Show Time in LCD (command-shift-f)

After setting up all the essentials, you can start the recording by pressing R to record and Space to pause.

Consider the recording has finished here, let's move on to next step.

Enhancing the Result

Though we have done many preventions to omit the noise, some may still be present in our speech recording. Thus, we need to add some effects to make our speech recording crystal clear.

To add a new effect, open Track Info Pane, go to Edit tab and Click on the empty spot that says, "Click here to add an effect".

Speech Enhancer

This effect is very useful in reducing noise. Not only it has the preset to suit female/male voice, but also it can be stacked in the case of having loud noise.

To manually set the effect, just click on the icon and a new pane will appear right in front of you.

Bandpass Filter

Some people might have annoying high-pitch voice; Some might have boring low-pitch voice. You can adjust it with GarageBand by using AUBandpass.

For this, it's essential to use manual adjustment: use your hearing ability and adjust the slider of center frequency. Note that I usually use around 600Hz (different speakers use different center frequency).

Until this point, you should be able to remove most of unwanted noise. And the next step is to export the recording.

Exporting to MP3 Format

To save your recording in MP3 format, choose Menu Bar → Share → Send Song to iTunes.

In the appearing pane, use MP3 Encoder as the compressor and Good Quality is the most suitable for speech recording.

Sorry for my long writing, hope you don't mind reading it. If you've something to express it, feel free to drop it on the comment box provided.

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