Friday, July 30, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
What's Useful in the Safari Extensions Gallery
What's Useful in the Safari Extensions Gallery
Safari's Extensions Gallery has gone live, and there's quite a bit to look through and add to your browser at launch. We took a gander through the offerings and picked out some of the extensions worth noting. Here's the (updating) list.
To use these extensions, you'll need to have Safari installed, and have it updated to the latest version. Both Macs and Windows installations have Apple's updating software you can use to grab the 5.0.1 copy, but if you've disabled Apple's Software Update on Windows, you'll need to grab a fresh copy manually.
We've provided links to the extension maker and a direct installation link for each extension we picked out, with each link coming from the extension maker. You may be asked whether you want to Open or Save the file we're linking to (choose "Open"), and if you're sure you want to install that extension ("Install," we presume). To manage these extensions once you've got them installed, head to your Safari preferences and look for the newly-enabled Extensions menu.
Social Networking
Better Facebook: Automatically hides posts you've already read, removes some of the cruft from the site, notifies you of new comments and un-friendings, and more. [Install in Safari]
Shut Up: Kills comments on many sites where you might get sick of them. [Install in Safari]
Bookmarking
Procrastinate: Adds text articles to bookmarking and reading services like Instapaper, Read it Later, and Delicious from an all-in-one toolbar button. [Install in Safari]
Twitter Tools
Twitter for Safari: Twitter's official client for sending tweets, but also reading tweets and seeing Twitter profiles related to the page you're on. You can easily tweet about a page you're looking at, too, with a pre-shortened URL. [Install in Safari]
GmailThis: Sends an email through Gmail's compose window, with the page you're on pre-loaded in the subject and body text. Basically, a fancy bookmarklet, but with a nice button. [Install in Safari]
TrueNew Count for Gmail and Google Apps: More than just providing a count of the messages marked unread, TrueNew's counter shows you how many messages are unread since the last time you looked at Gmail or Google Apps. [Install in Safari]
Shopping
InvisibleHand: Like the Firefox and (slightly scandalous) Chrome extensions, InvisibleHand checks the shopping item pages you're looking at to see if the item is offered elsewhere—Amazon, Buy.com, and the like—at a cheaper price. [Install in Safari]
Entertainment
A Cleaner YouTube: Claims to transform YouTube into a "quiet and peaceful place" by cutting out most of everything except the video itself. [Install in Safari]
Turn Off the Lights: As with its nifty Chrome counterpart, this little button throws a shade over everything except the video you're watching on YouTube, Vimeo, or embedded clips. [Install in Safari]
Security
LastPass: One of our favorite universal password systems, LastPass is an elegant little plug-in for storing your passwords, filling them in automatically, and yet keeping them encrypted and available anywhere you go. [Install in Safari]
Web of Trust: Reads out everything the very excellent Web of Trust community knows about the site you're on—encryption, trustworthiness, vendor reliability for various components, and so on. [Install in Safari]
Photos
Awesome Screenshot: Like its Chrome counterpart, Awesome Screenshot handles the capture, annotation, sensitive data blurring, and upload/sharing aspects of grabbing web pages, no extra software needed. [Install in Safari]
Search Tools
Mafuyu: Brings back the keyboard navigation of Google results once had in a Labs experiment—numbers 0-9 for results, results scrolling, and the like. [Install in Safari]
Productivity
AdBlock: Like it does on every other browser ever made, AdBlock for Safari uses a custom list of ad servers and your own preferences to kill annoying advertisements on web sites. [Install in Safari]
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Monday, July 26, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
Peppermint Ice is a Webapp-Based Linux Distro Without Excluding Native Apps
Peppermint Ice is a Webapp-Based Linux Distro Without Excluding Native Apps
Linux: While the main idea behind Chrome OS is pretty cool, you may not want to limit yourself to only webapps. Pepprmint Ice is a Linux distribution that is based on webapp usage, but allows the installation of native apps.
Peppermint Ice is based off Linux Mint, but designed to be a fast-booting, webapp-launching Chrome OS competitor. It's default browser is Chromium, and it contains shortcuts to all the same webapps, like Facebook, Seesmic, Hulu, Pandora, and the Google Suite, but also contains apps like Transmission and Dropbox, which are just plain better as native apps.
While, of course, you could mod any Linux distribution to act like this, Peppermint Ice comes pre-configured for those that want a hassle-free experience. If you want to add a shortcut to any other webapp, Peppermint Ice has a built-in tool to do so. In fact, it's easy enough to use that even non-Linux veterans can figure it out pretty easily. If you tried Chrome OS and found that it was a bit too minimal, Peppermint Ice may be just your speed. Hit the link to try it out.
Peppermint Ice [via Download Squad]Send an email to Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com.
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Thursday, July 22, 2010
Lifehacker Pack for Mac: Our List of the Best Free Mac Downloads
Lifehacker Pack for Mac: Our List of the Best Free Mac Downloads
Looking to beef up your Mac with a few great—and free—apps that cover a whole lot of your productivity and computing needs? Our annual Lifehacker Pack for Mac rounds up the best free downloads for OS X.
Productivity
Quicksilver: Quicksilver is an application launcher and then some, capable of browsing your file system, firing off quick emails, flipping through your iTunes library, and much, much more. It can be a bit difficult to wrap your head around, so rather than go into too much detail here, check out our beginner guide, settings tweaks, and video demonstrations. [Download]
Bean: You're on a Mac, and chances are pretty good you're not eager to shell out cash for Microsoft Office to open and edit the occasional Word document. Bean is an extremely fast, lightweight document editor (and written in Cocoa) that handles Word documents like a gem. It's not a replacement for Word, but if you don't need everything that word offers (and you don't want a bloated replacement like OpenOffice.org), Bean's a great option. [Download]
Notational Velocity: This brilliant little note-taking application creates, searches, tags, and syncs plain text notes between desktops, the web, and even your iPhone (syncing takes place either through Dropbox [see below] or the excellent web-based Simplenote). If you're an obsessive plain text note-taker or to-do list creator, you won't regret giving it a test run. [Download]
TextWrangler: If you do heavier text editing than Notational Velocity offers—like, say, coding—free text editor TextWrangler is a great tool for the job. A good share of Mac fans pony up for premium apps like TextMate, but if you don't feel like shelling out $50 to get your coding on, TextWrangler's a great option. [Download]
Internet/Communication
Firefox/Chrome: These two are fighting for default browser status on many a Mac, and frankly, they're neck and neck in our hearts at this point. Google just dropped the beta tag from Chrome for Mac and released their first stable build; meanwhile, Firefox still has a few features we'd sorely miss if we switched over to Chrome. For now, we'd happily recommend either. [Download: Firefox/Chrome]
Adium: Adium is hands-down the best multi-protocol instant messaging client we've used on any platform. It's completely customizable, works with almost any chat network you'd want, and still outdoes iChat on most fronts. (Though if you're a big user of iChat's admittedly great screen sharing and video chat tools, it's unfortunately not up to snuff on those points.) [Download]
Cyberduck: This excellent open source client can connect to and upload/download files via FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, and even Google Docs. Cyberduck's impressive feature list is a little too long to dive into, but if you thought you needed to pay money for a solid FTP client on your Mac, take a look at Cyberduck first. [Download]
Fluid: If you turn to web applications more than you do desktop apps, this free, open source tool creates standalone "apps" for any web site you throw at it. With the right set of user scripts and tweaks, your Fluid-made site-specific-browsers (or SSBs) can display Growl notifications, Dock badges, and make your web apps feel more like they're running on your desktop. [Download]
Utilities
The Unarchiver: Your Mac's built-in Archiver Utility isn't bad, but if you regularly traffic in archive file types like the popular RAR format, it can't handle all your needs. The Unarchiver unpacks traditional ZIP archives along with RAR, TAR, 7Z, Stuffit, and most obscure archive types you could get your hands on. [Download]
uTorrent/Transmission: It used to be that when it came time to download something on your Mac via BitTorrent, you only really had one solid choice: the open source Transmission. But as of just a few days ago, uTorrent—the most popular BitTorrent client for Windows—upgraded to a 1.0 release. uTorrent for Mac still isn't up to snuff when compared to the Windows version, but we still think it's a solid alternative to Transmission—though some would argue that Transmission is more "Mac-like". [Download: uTorrent/Transmission]
Burn: OS X's built-in Disk Utility is actually quite good at burning ISOs and other disk images to optical media like CDs and DVDs, but the aptly-named, open-source Burn is a great supplement for less esoteric burning duties. Burn handles data, audio, video, and disc copying in a very user-friendly interface. [Download]
Growl: Growl is a universal system notification tool that displays attractive system notifications and integrates with nearly every really popular Mac application (including the majority of the apps on this list). As handy and popular as this universal notification application is, it's still hard to believe it hasn't been built into OS X already. [Download]
Dropbox: This handy utility adds a Dropbox folder to your user directory and instantaneously syncs any file you add to, edit, or delete from that folder to Dropbox's cloud servers and to any other computer you've installed Dropbox on. If you regularly move around between a couple of computers or you just wouldn't mind a way to access and back up a few of your most important files, Dropbox is a must. [Download]
Mozy: We regularly preach the importance of backup, and the newest release of Mozy is a double-threat of both on-site and off-site backup with impressive ease of use. You get the local backup and 2GB of online backup for free, or for $5 a month, you get unlimited online backups. We don't normally urge people to pry open their pocketbooks, but with Mozy's unlimited backup, we strongly believe it's worth it. [Download]
Media
VLC: Throw any video or audio file you can find at VLC and it'll play it, no matter how obscure the format. While not necessarily as friendly on the eyes as QuickTime, VLC is a workhorse of a media player that we've turned to in many a dark hour when it looked like a file might not play. [Download]
iTunes: iTunes may be one of the most controversial apps on this list. Some love it, some hate it, but the fact remains that if you're firmly planted in Apple hardware and software, iTunes is the glue that keeps all of your media together. And if you're an iPhone/iPod/iPad owner, it's still a must. [Download]
Seashore: Photoshop may be the gold standard for image editing, but if all you need to do is some basic photo editing and you don't want to fire up an industrial workhorse to get it done, Seashore is a handy tool to have on hand. [Download]
Picasa: If you're unhappy with iLife's default photo management software, iPhoto—and many Mac users on the Lifehacker staff are—Google's Picasa offers a strong alternative. It handles many of the same features iPhoto does, plus it integrates like a charm with your Google account and Picasa Web Albums online. [Download]
Handbrake: Got a DVD you'd like to rip to your hard drive in a high-quality, portable-device-friendly format? Turn to the extremely popular, always handy Handbrake. [Download]
We've done a fair amount of tweaking from last year's Lifehacker Pack for Mac, so check out our previous Mac Pack if you're still hungry for a few other options. Let's hear about your must-have apps (whether we listed them or not) in the comments.
Send an email to Adam Pash, the author of this post, at tips+adam@lifehacker.com.
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