MacEdition Pro News : May 12, 2003
Trinkets and other treasures
by MacEdition Staff (feedback)
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Turn your dock into a launcher
For all you folks sick and tired of fumbling around with Finder windows in the attempt to drill down to an application or document buried in your hard drive YostWorks has a little thing that might be attractive to you.
The YostWorks Dock Dispatcher 1.0.2 application creates and maintains a Dispatcher folder in the Dock – a hot button to a hierarchical menu with your apps, utilities categorized for easy access. Leverages existing Mac OS X functionality, not a system extension. Mac OS X 10.1 or later.
Unlike dragging the hard drive icon to the dock and control-clicking from there, Dock Dispatcher will help the user organize the programs and will load icons for their favorites and home folders. The US$5 program is available for download from the YostWorks site and there is a QuickTime demo of the program at work.
Sooner secure than sorry
In this day and age of a well connected world, one wants to be very sure that their valuable information (read: credit card numbers, PINs, and passwords) are either kept from prying eyes or made very difficult to obtain by those nasty people out there.
Mere Mortal Software has created a program which allows a user to store that information in an encrypted database file.
The Safe Place is a Mac OS X shareware application that makes it easy to find your passwords, credit card numbers, software registration numbers, and any other information that needs to be kept safe from prying eyes.
Version 1.1 adds a powerful import assistant, making it easy to import data from other programs. The update also includes increased security and an export feature.
The Safe Place application comes pre-configured with seven common categories for storing software registration information, banking and credit card numbers, and Web and FTP site passwords. Users can change these default categories as well as create new ones. Each category can have up to six custom fields. Any field can be set to store either a text value, a password, a URL or an email address
The Safe Place is a US$10 shareware title which can be downloaded from the Mere Mortal website.
The more the merrier
All those clipping mavens out there might want to take note that Inventive Inc. has taken its iClip application to a new level.
The shareware developer took iClip to version two adding clipping sets, improving support for vector graphic formats, improving icons and making the program more responsive to user clicks.
iClip is a utility that helps you get past the limitations of having a single Clipboard. It allows you to quickly copy & paste and drag & drop clippings to and from its multiple “clipping bins” so that you can easily access them in the applications you’re using. The clippings can be of various types such as text, pictures, Internet locations, sounds, and more. Clippings can be organized into unlimited groups called “clipping sets” to help you keep all of your clippings neatly arranged. Since the Scrapbook application that was in older Mac OS versions isn’t a part of Mac OS X, iClip can conveniently serve as a replacement for it.
The US$19.95 program can be downloaded from Inventive’s product page.
Safe disks and secure data
SubRosaSoft has been busy since forming their strategic alliance with Firewire Depot.
The company just released DiskGuardian, a drive diagnostic and repair utility. The software, which carries a sticker price of US$69.99, features the use of SMART technology to report probable disk failures before they occur. The program will also allow the user to conduct backups of data on the disk in addition to the usual array of disk checking and repairing utilities.
SubRosaSoft DiskGuardian is a collection of tools and helpers that guards the data on your disks. Integrating SMART monitoring, HFS+ journaling, volume repair, surface scanning, hardware integrity checking, benchtesting, backup/restore, and online reporting, it not only diagnoses and repairs disks, but it can predict many problems long before they occur.
SubRosa also released a new set of file management utilities on the market which aim to take care of file security issues on OS X.
The US$24.95 suite of utilities allow the user to encrypt and decrypt files, securely shred documents, zero-out free space on a hard drive and send text strings across the internet without giving third-parties the ability to clearly see the information going across.
“In additional to the new utilities, the original trio of the software are also updated with improvements such as support for Apple Keychain and a better user interface than the already easy-to use design,” said Marko Kostyrko, creator of the original SubRosa file utilities.
Demonstration versions of the programs are available on the SubRosa site.
What’s in a name?
Signaling a possible shift in product focus Salling Software has renamed their nifty Sony-Ericsson Clicker to Salling Clicker.
“The user reaction to Clicker has been phenomenal and our commitment to Sony Ericsson products remains very strong,” said Jonas Salling, software artisan and Salling Software’s creative force. “Going forward, however, I felt it made a lot of sense to not rule out the possibility of supporting other mobile devices.”
In case you’ve been off world for the past couple of months, Salling clicker is a US$9.95 utility that lets the owner of a Sony Ericsson Bluetooth enabled phone use the device as a remote control for a Bluetooth enabled Mac.
Should you want to give the program a try there is a 30-click demo available for download from the Salling site.
Yabber, yabber, yabber...
If your fingers are getting tired from typing in all those on-line chat sessions, MacSpeech has an offering your tired fingers might find too tempting to resist.
The company announced a US$10 add-on for their iListen voice recognition software that puts over 60 additional voice commands at the beck and call of an iChat user.
“This is a great addition to our range of add-ons for iListen,”, said MacSpeech’s Donald MacCormick. “Now for the first time you can talk over the Internet using iListen, and experience hands free online chat!”
The iChat ScriptPak follows closely on the heals of a similar package MacSpeech recently released for Apple’s iLife suite of consumer level programs. The iLife ScriptPak is available for each of the four programs in the suite at US$10 per program or US$25 for the whole kit and caboodle.
Beginning from the end
PUBLICSPACE.NET has come to the end of its long trek to convert its A Better Finder series of utilities to OS X by releasing A Better Finder Attributes.
This is the first version of the popular Finder file attribute manipulation utility for Mac OS X. The product has been rewritten from scratch to take full advantage of Mac OS X’s powerful Cocoa programming interface. This version includes the ability to change modification and creation dates, lock and unlock files and hide file extensions on a per file basis.
The US$9.95 utility is also available in a bundle with A Better Finder Rename, Select and Creators and Types for US$34.95 and can be obtained from the Publicspace website.
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