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Secrets Unhides Hidden Preferences
August 05 2008
Hidden preferences are among the favorite items covered in the Tips & Tricks sections of Mac-related websites, and the method usually presented for setting these preferences is via the defaults Terminal command. Thanks to a utility called Secrets, which compiles an extensive list of hidden preferences for the software installed… read moreSoftware Usability Testing for the Rest of Us
July 29 2008
If you're a software developer and you honestly care about the user-friendliness of your software, it is not enough to simply guess which user interface works best for your application: you must _test_ your products with real users. A new usability testing tool for the Macintosh, called "Silverback," now makes… read moreHave Apple Mail Pre-Prioritize Your Messages
July 22 2008
Handling email has always been a kind of fight for me: unfortunately, I am highly susceptible to procrastination, so as soon as I spot a fresh mailing list digest or a new issue of my favorite Macintosh e-zine in my inbox amongst all those _important_ emails, it's the latter which… read moreJuly 15 2008
In iTunes and on iPods, "audiobook" is not just another genre, but a distinct type of audio file with a few useful extra features. Creating your own files of this type is possible, and there are numerous tutorials on how to do this. But this is a non-trivial and tedious… read more"Made on a Mac" on a Big Scale
July 08 2008
With 170 print titles -- including the best-selling German tabloid "Bild" --, some 10,000 employees, and a revenue of 2.6 billion Euros in 2007, publishing house Axel Springer group is one of Germany's leading media companies. Thanks to their recent decision to go all-Macs, they will also be one of… read moreDude, You Get a Dell IM Service Now!
July 01 2008
With a little help from their friends at SightSpeed, Dell have launched their own video chat service, aptly named: "Dell Video Chat." It's a nice touch that a Mac client for this service is available. But is there a good reason to actually use it? read moreAnother Round of "Next Action" Hide-and-Seek With OmniFocus
June 24 2008
Two weeks ago, I complained about something not being quite right with the way OmniFocus -- a task management application based on GTD -- handles repeating actions, which may cause most of a project's actions to be hidden from you. In the comments to that blog post, a reader suggested… read moreScreenFlow Wins Two Apple Design Awards
June 17 2008
The bottom line I gave to my review of ScreenFlow, Vara Software's screencasting studio software, last month was that " ScreenFlow does deliver on the promise of providing a one-stop-shop tool for creating high-quality screencasts with excellent visual effects, and it does so in a polished, modern, and totally Mac-like… read moreSmartSleep Makes "Safe Sleep" Safer
June 17 2008
When, three weeks ago, I blogged about Patrick Stein's "SmartSleep" preferences panel, which lets you configure a Mac laptop's sleep and hibernation (aka "Safe Sleep") settings, I explained that I wanted to use this software to switch off Safe Sleep altogether, because that feature had failed on my MacBook so… read moreWhen OmniFocus Plays Hide-and-Seek With "Next Actions"
June 10 2008
One of the fundamental concepts used in OmniFocus is that of "Next Action." Each project has a Next Action, and it is the very next task you have to get done in order to keep that project moving. Being able to focus on such Next Actions is tremendously helpful for… read moreAnother Small Brick in Mail.app's Anti-Malware Wall
June 03 2008
One of the few "dangerous emails" that made it past my rather aggressive SpamAssassin setup recently was a phishing attempt, claiming to have been sent by Google's AdWords service. When I took a closer look at this email, I noticed a header field that I hadn't come across before, and… read moreMake Your Mac Laptop Lose Some (Safe) Sleep
May 27 2008
The Safe Sleep feature in more recent Apple laptops is a good idea in theory: every time the computer goes to sleep, the entire contents of its RAM are written to disk so that the machine's state can be quickly restored in case the computer runs out of juice while… read moreMay 20 2008
Thanks to cross-platform GUI libraries, writing an application that can be deployed on more than just one computing platform is reasonably straight-forward. But there is more to making an application truly Mac-like than just compiling it for Mac OS X. read moreMulti-track video effects with ScreenFlow
May 13 2008
Commenting on my recent review of ScreenFlow, my esteemed colleague David Battino wondered if this screencast recording software could also serve as a replacement for Apple's iMovie for quickly editing videos. The short answer to that is, no, ScreenFlow can't replace iMovie, but -- it does have some tricks up… read moreMay 06 2008
Sometimes, new phenomena show up in Internetland that, at first sight, make you wonder about who would really need this. But keep an eye on them for a while, and you may notice a few things about them that make it well worthwhile to try them out yourself, after all.… read more
