PRODUCT REVIEWS
Lee Wight MD, our product liaison and a board member, reviews one new product a month for Mac owners to consider. His reviews are presented on this page.
March 2012
Yoink
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Several months ago we reviewed a program called Fiwi, which simplifies and clarifies the problem of moving files or folders from one location to another, minimizing the potential errors inherent in drilling down through multiple spring-loaded folders, and obviating the need to open a second window manually and resizing and moving the now two windows. Yoink is another little program that accomplishes the same thing by a completely different route, one that you may or may not prefer. Personally, I’m leaning toward Yoink’s method, currently. If Yoink is running, whenever you drag a file or folder in the Finder, a small shelf appears on the side of your screen. Drag your item onto the shelf, and the item’s icon appears on the shelf, from where it can be dragged at your leisure to its new location, which can be anywhere in your drive’s folder hierarchy. The actual file or folder, of course, doesn’t move until you drag the icon off the shelf to its new home. If you use OS X’s Spaces, it’s handy for moving files across workspaces and into full-screen apps, even onto separate monitors, because the shelf appears in every workspace. Just as in the Finder, the item is moved or copied, depending on whether the destination is in the same or a different volume. You can also drag a clipping of text from a document, or even an image from a webpage, onto the shelf and later drag it into a different document or application, although it is reported that the shelf doesn’t always appear promptly in these conditions. I have not had this problem myself. Also, it can take a few seconds before that clipping is available for dragging. |
After moving an item onto the shelf, the shelf remains visible until you empty it by dragging all of your files to their destinations or by deleting those items from the shelf, although there are options for hiding the shelf by menu choice or keyboard shortcut.
There are numerous other options for modifying Yoink’s behavior, including locating the shelf on any side of your screen and choosing how long the shelf stays on the screen when it’s waiting for you to drop something onto it.
Under the heading of minor annoyances potentially dealt with in a subsequent version; the shelf is too narrow to display most item names, and there’s no way to view the full name; although there is an option to lock icons onto the shelf after dragging them off, the opportunity does not exist for individual files.
Yoink 2.0 requires Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later and is available from the Mac App Store for $2.99. A 15-day trial version is available.
February 2012
Desktop Curtain |
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Lets face it, desktop clutter affects all of us some of the time and some of us all the time. It is likely that if you examined your computer desktop right now, you would find several open windows from two or more different programs, plus numerous icons representing drives, folders, documents, and images. This can be a distracting background if you are trying to concentrate on some work in a program in the foreground. Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to drop a temporary curtain between the various layers; desktop wallpaper, icons, and various program windows?
Desktop Curtain can do this for you by hiding the clutter on your desktop. This is useful for narrowing your focus, and also if you need a plain background, of your choice, for screenshots. The default image is, not surprisingly, a curtain, but you can choose any image available on your system. Your curtain is easily customizable with keystrokes to hide or show it instantly, and you can fine-tune how the curtain behaves. It can be inserted at any level: as a normal window (so it can sit in front of, between, or behind other windows), as a desktop cover (so it covers everything on your desktop but stays behind windows), or as a traditional desktop background (so you continue to see all windows and anything else on your desktop). There is now a Boss mode that immediately places the curtain in front of everything on the screen.
You can also choose how the curtain interacts with Exposé: It can act as a standard window that utilizes Exposé’s various preview states; it can remain in place, so Exposé previews float over it; or it can hide completely when you activate Exposé. However, I found this feature to work imperfectly, at least in OS X 7.2 Lion.
Desktop Curtain Classic 1.5.2 runs natively on both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs and requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later, and is free from the website. Desktop Curtain 2.2, a more refined version that is under continuous development, requires an Intel-based Mac and Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later, and goes for $1.99 from the App Store. It can be run as a standard (Dock icon) application, as a menu bar only application, or as a faceless background application. I found Desktop Curtain to be a surprisingly useful little utility, with more then adequate documentation and an unbeatable price.
Web: http://manytricks.com/desktopcurtain/
App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/app/desktop-curtain/id414088151?mt=12
Click here to go to the Newsletter Page.January 2012
Inpaint 3.0.2 |
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We all have had the experience in our photo-taking careers of snapping the seemingly perfect shot, only to find that there is an unwanted and unnoticed tree branch, power line, or even a person in the image that subtracts from our effort. With film cameras, we are pretty well stuck with the image as taken; not all bad, but with digital photography we can cheat a bit. Any readers who have attended Anne Clark’s elegant Photoshop Elements classes can deal with this skillfully, but for a quick and easy (and cheap) solution to many such problems, there are some simple alternatives.
Inpaint is a surprisingly effective example. It is useful for removing time/date stamps that we forgot to turn off, watermarks, stray specks and scratches, and even for touching up facial blemishes. Operation is easy. First open the image in inPaint, or drag the image to inPaint’s icon in the Dock; then, using the mouse pointer, color in the object to be removed; click the inPaint button in the toolbar, and in seconds the blemish, scratch, or whatever is gone. It’s almost that magic, usually. It works by surveying the surrounding areas of the photo to generate realistic-looking filler. The area sampled for the filler is marked by a rectangle, which may be resized manually before processing, or after, for a second try if necessary. Obviously, there are circumstances where this approach produces chaos, but that can also be true in Photoshop. Also, if there is more than one object to remove, it is best to make separate passes, rather than try to do all at once. The program lacks documentation, but it is really as simple as described. And for $0.99, it seems a no-brainer.
Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway: make a duplicate of your original image to work on, and have something to revert back to in case of problems!
Requires Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later. Available at Mac App Store: itunes.apple.com/us/app/inpaint/id415492014.
Sure, you could do this with Photoshop, but how about with a program that costs only 99¢?