5 Mac OS X Apps I cannot do without

June 22, 2008

Picture 2.pngTwo days from now, I complete 8 awesome months of using a Mac. My Mac Mini has been one of the two best purchases I’ve made, the second being my iPhone. These eight months have made me realize what I’ve been missing all these years and that there’s more to computing than viruses and BSODs.

No matter what kind of task it may be, doing it on a Mac is so much simpler and yet better. Everything in Mac OS X is so well thought out and implemented. And then came along Mac OS 10.5 Leopard which was like the icing on the cake. This version of Mac OS X brought along some super-useful features and one of them being the super awesome ‘Quick Look’.

However, this post is not about the OS but rather, some great apps written for the OS that completely blow you away. Here’s my list of 5 Mac OS X apps that I just can’t do without.

1. MailPlane: MailPlane is a SSB ( Site Specific Browser ) for GMail. The app combines the features of Gmail with the friendliness a Mac by offering some nifty features such as (a) Drag and Drop attachment of files, (b) Attaching pics right from iPhoto, (c) Multiple Gmalil accounts, (d) Growl Notifications, (e) Same Gmail keyboard shortcuts and many other features. MailPlane also lets you set labels to your messages on the fly. There is also a OmniFocus plugin that lets your create tasks right from your conversations. I’ve been trying the latest beta releases too and I must say, the app looks really promising.

MailplaneScreen.jpg

Grab the demo here, or buy the app here. There is also a family option available and a special discount if you’re a student.

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GrabUp: ScreenShot sharing made easy

May 18, 2008

There are a million reasons why I find Mac OS X better than the other OS around ( Yes, I said better. NOT best. ) One of them, is GrabUp.

GrabUp Logo

GrabUp is a preference pane for your Mac OS X that makes it extremely easy to share screenshots with other people quickly. All it takes is 3 keys. Let me elaborate a little about this nifty little utility. I’m pretty sure, I’ll find this installed on your Macs, if you haven’t already by now.

Installation:

The 567kb file can be downloaded from the site and once installed, it can be accessed as a preference pane from the System Preferences.

Usage:

Apple and Mac OS have already made it easy to take screen shots of your desktop or the apps that you have running.

1) Command + Shift + 3 ( ⌘ Shift 3 ) – This takes a screenshot of the entire screen and saves the file to the desktop.
2) Command + Shift + 4 ( ⌘ Shift 4 ) – This will give you a crosshair, using which you can select the area you want to take a screenshot of.
3) Command + Shift + 4 + Spacebar – After hitting a spacebar after the above, you can click the mouse to take the screenshot of only the window or app that is in focus. Similar to Alt + PrintScreen in windows.

All the 3 methods above, save the screenshot taken as a file on the desktop.

But what happens when you have to share the screenshots with a friend or colleague ? Your options would be to email them, drag the screenshot to an IM window or as most other users, upload the images to an image hosting site.

Here’s where GrabUp comes into the picture. GrabUp automatically uploads the images to their server and returns the URL by copying it to clipboard. That leaves you to just paste it wherever you want to. Fantastic, isn’t it ?

But, is that all it does ? No. There’s more to it.

What’s more?

GrabUp stores the URLs of your last 10 screenshots and links them to the URLs. This is presented to you with the exact date and time at which it was taken, accessible from the menu bar.

GrabUp recent images

Clicking on it opens up the image in your default browser. There is an option to clear the list of recent items too.

The URL returned changes the filename to a randomly generated string, so it is almost impossible to guess the images uploaded to the server. An example of the link would be /uploads/799366f2e6b804dcee28de284e431015.png

Limitations/Disadvantages?

The developers have tried to keep it as simple as possible. So there are no options to configure at all, except the option to start at login and show in menu bar. However, I would really like to have one option in the preference pane. There are times where I don’t want the screenshot to be uploaded to the server. At such moments, I have to quit GrabUp, take the screenshot and then then relaunch it again. Instead, there can be a hot key setting that would somehow not upload the screenshot to their servers.

Secondly, I don’t know if this has been left out on purpose, but some kind of user login system would be helpful to retrieve old screenshots.

At the time of publishing this article, GrabUp has had 4180 downloads and 24,406 grabs have been uploaded to their servers.

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