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Posts tagged with "mac"

Instaview Giveaway, Unique Mac Instagram Viewer

We’re currently running a giveaway of Saver (for iPhone) and Foliozo (for iPad) - now its time for a third giveaway this week, a Mac app! We’re giving away 5 copies of Instaview, which at its core is a unique Instagram viewer for your Mac desktop. With Instaview you can create multiple ‘windows’ that each contain an Instagram stream, each window can also be customised with different frames and borders.

The streams available include everything from the Popular and your following feeds to location and tag-based streams and more. Just like the Instagram iPhone app you can comment and like images as well as follow (or unfollow) people. All in all, Instaview is a very customisable Instagram app for the Mac that also adds a nice touch of decoration to your Mac’s desktop.

Be sure to check out the full feature list of Instaview, which you can purchase from the Mac App Store for $7.99. However if you are interested in winning one of the 5 copies of Instaview that we are giving away, be sure to jump the break for all the details.

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Mac Utility Cocktail Gets Updated To Support Lion

A few days ago the popular Mac utility, Cocktail, received an update to add Lion compatibility. The new version 5 of Cocktail also adds new Automator actions, fixes bugs and sees improved documentation. If you are unfamiliar with Cocktail, it’s a utility that gives users the tools to clean, optimise and repair their Macs. There is a mix of maintenance tools, tweaks and power user options for everything from adjusting disk options to clearing various caches to customizing the look of OS X.

Jump the break for some screenshots of the new Lion version of Cocktail. You can also download a free demo of Cocktail (limited to using it 10 times) with lifetime licenses start from $19 for a single-user.

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Tunesque: iTunes Search Made Easy From The Menubar

Many people claim searching any of Apple’s iTunes Stores is tedious, inane work. You have to launch an app, navigate to the search box and type for your result - and that’s only for searching one of Apple’s services at a time. Now imagine a ‘mythical’ Mac app that lets you search the Mac App Store and iTunes App Stores at the same time.

It’s no myth - enter Tunesque by AFK Studio. Tunesque lives in your Mac’s menubar: click the icon, and start typing to finds apps, music, movies, and books across all stores and “app stores” without having to manually launch them. If you feel Tunesque’s search is too broad, simply open the Preferences and define what categories you want to search for – you can check them all or just a few. Plus, the app works with your local iTunes Store, anywhere in the world, so you can select which international store you need and go.

Tunesque has 2 color schemes, light and dark, so you can pick the mood you’re in that day while you search for that new Pantera single. I prefer the light scheme as it matches the OS better, but some people may like the dark tone for added contrast. The app could be improved with a global hotkey in the prefs, though clicking the menubar icon is still faster that a traditional search method.

Once you enter a search term, let’s say OmniFocus, you can arrow down through the results (it even lists prices) and a hovercard will pop out to the side giving you the app’s description - this is a nice feature.

Tunesque is available from the app’s website and is a small download - only 811kb, with a smaller price - free. Please note that when you use Tunesque to find apps, Apple pays the developers a small commission via iTunes’ affiliate service but this doesn’t affect the price to the customer. A direct download for the app can be found here.

If you search the App Store and iTunes more frequently than browsing, Tunesque will be a great time saver.

Customize Your Mac’s “Paste and Match Style”

On the Mac, the paste function associated with the CMD + V keyboard shortcut has a well-known side effect: if you’re writing a document and you paste something from your clipboard, the document’s style won’t be automatically matched. Quite possibly a “feature” per Apple’s design choice, since I switched to the Mac I’ve always been annoyed by such “remember every style” behavior, and from the reaction I’ve seen on Twitter, it turns out quite a few people dislike when they end up with weird styles in their outlines or email messages as well.

But, you might argue, there is a way to paste and match style, and that’s represented by the ⌥⇧⌘V shortcut…which requires four fingers to execute, and it’s not always implemented in the same way in third party apps. Chrome, for instance, uses ⇧⌘V, and many other apps follow a similar trend to modify the default shortcut for Paste and Match Style.

In the past few days, I’ve come across some interesting solutions to unify Paste and Match Style with a simpler keyboard shortcut, and make it the default paste action on OS X if you never want to paste with “styles”. This can be particularly handy for writers, who often prefer a plain text environment or a styled one that’s, however, consistent throughout a document. Read more