Cool Tools
Sidenote keeps your notes on the side
So for quite a while now I’ve been using nothing more complicated than TextEdit to keep a list of what I’ve got on my plate any given day — I stuck an “Untitled” text file in the top corner of my screen, and just kept it open all the time. But I wasn’t quite satisfied with that — at the end of the day, I still had this text file open, I never remembered to save what was in there, and it just wasn’t as elegant a solution as I wanted. Wasn’t there anything I could keep open as a memopad, that was smart enough to save itself and slide out of the way when I didn’t need it?
A friend recommended Sidenote, and it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for — like the Quicksilver Shelf (which I’m using religiously nowadays) it sits in drawer on the side of your desktop, can be pulled open momentarily (either with the mouse or a hotkey) and then slides right back out of view when you’re done. Just like TextEdit, it allows for a nice variety of text formatting, and unlike TextEdit, it saves in a repository rather than a file. I only use one note so far, but there’s functionality for multiple notes in there as well.
We last mentioned Sidenote way back in 2005, and since then it’s been upgraded to 1.7.3, and streamlined a few already streamlined features. Very nice and easy app — for the purpose, it was exactly what I needed. It’s available as donationware from developer Pierre Chatel. Read
Popularity: 12% [?]
PopChar X 4.0
PopChar X, the little utility that gets all of those funky symbols, accents, and other special characters into your documents without having to remember arcane key codes, has been updated to version 4 for Mac.
PopChar has been around for over 20 years and is a favorite of editors and designers. To type a special character, you click on a P in the menu bar and a list of characters appears. Selecting the character you want drops it into your current document. Sure, you could always use Apple’s Character Palette tool, but it’s slow, and difficult to search for a special character in a particular font.
PopChar X 4.0 adds a new feature for searching Unicode characters by name across font boundaries. Ergonis, developer of PopChar, provides an example of searching for a “cubic meters” symbol in Helvetica. Typing in “cub” produces no results, but you can click a new “All” button to search across all Unicode fonts.
You can download a trial version of PopChar X 4.0, or purchase it online from Ergonis for €29.99. Multiple license packs are available at a discount. Read
Popularity: 8% [?]
MacGDBp Kills PHP Bugs Dead!
Bothered with pesky PHP bugs? Grab a can of MacGDBp and exterminate those bugs FAST!
18 year-old Beantown open source whiz Robert Sesek has announced that he’ll be releasing his MacGDBp project bright and early on Tuesday, June 18 at his Blue Static website.
MacGDBp builds on the open source Xdebug application to provide a native Cocoa Leopard-only app for remote debugging of PHP scripts. Connect to your running PHP script and you can do instruction stepping to see how your script is working. You can set breakpoints, view the current function call stack, and look at all local variable values.
Robert noted that MacGDBp is designed to be very familiar to anyone who has spent time using the Xcode debugger. He’s releasing the app under the GNU GPL version 2, which (duh) means it is available at no cost.
If you do any work with PHP (hey, I’m constantly customizing WordPress myself), MacGDBp may be your new best friend. Be sure to set an iCal alarm for Tuesday morning and get your copy of MacGDBp.
Thank you, Robert, for telling us about your app! Read
Popularity: 10% [?]
Freeware Find: IceClean 3.0b
Most of us know that we should perform regular maintenance on our Macs, usually simple things such as doing backups and shaking pizza crumbs out of the keyboard. But did you know that there are a number of UNIX System Tasks that are available for keeping your Mac running at peak performance?
A lot of Mac users don’t want to pull up Terminal and type arcane text into the command line, so MacDentro has a GUI front end that you can use to run those commands and keep your Mac cruisin’. IceClean, now at version 3.0.6 has menus for OS X Maintenance, Cleanup, Security and Network, and Utilities, all of which are packed with menu choices or keyboard shortcut equivalents that make mundane maintenance chores simple to perform.
There are other apps available — Maintenance and MacJanitor come to mind — that perform similar tasks, but neither of those programs comes close to the depth of capability of IceClean.
The price is right, too - it’s free, although you might want to send the MacDentro folks a donation if you find yourself using IceClean regularly. Download IceClean here.
Tip of the hat to our very own Victor Agreda for this find! Read
Popularity: 15% [?]
Keyboard Maestro 3.1 Orchestrates Macros
Macros can save you a lot of time performing repetitive functions on your Mac. While Automator and AppleScript provide a lot of power, some Mac users want an easier way to capture their keystrokes, mouse clicks and other actions. That’s where Keyboard Maestro comes in.
This $36 gem from Stairways Software has just been updated to version 3.1, and adds a profusion of new features. While there’s not enough space here to list them all, some of the highlights include:
- A clipboard history switcher
- An action to save a clipboard to a Named Clipboard
- Clipboard Filters
- Centering windows on the current screen
- Fractional second (i.e., .75) pauses
- Can add BBEdit Text Factories to the current clipboard
Stairways also fixed some known glitches from the 3.0 release. A 30-day free trial is available for download and requires Mac OS X 10.4 or better.
Popularity: 9% [?]
