We got a huge response to our Quicksilver article yesterday. I hadn’t realised just how popular this software is, and what a huge (cult) following it has! The thing about good software – actually, scrub that. The thing about great software is just when you think you’ve sussed out what it can do, you end up discovering hidden depths. That’s almost an understatement as far as Quicksilver is concerned. One great feature of Quicksilver is the quick look feature now built into it. That means, [...]

We’ve talked before about Alfred. Supplementing Spotlight searches with Alfred is a great way of working without leaving the keyboard. If you talk about launchers, Quicksilver is the mother of all launchers. Actually, to call it a “launcher” is the mother of all understatements. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Alfred modelled itself on Quicksilver, especially if you grab Alfred’s Powerpack. The advantage of Quicksilver is that it’s free, and immensely powerful. You can also install new addons, themes and scripts directly from Quicksilver’s [...]

  I came across BetterTouchTool a while ago, when I was using a Magic Mouse and my iMac. This absolutely fabulous app lets you take your multi-touch device, like your Magic Mouse, your MacBook trackpad or your Magic Trackpad and soup it up with even more gestures. With my Magic Mouse, I found gestures just too clunky. The mouse was just too small for my chunky fingers and I ended up mixing my gestures up all the time. Now I have a shiny MacBook Pro, [...]

I’ve been an owner of the original Apple TV for a while. I love the way it syncs all my photos, videos and music to its own hard drive. Along with my actual backup, it’s a great way of keeping all my music and photos on another hard drive. The fact that it connects to a TV and allows me to play my entire connection through my sound system is just the icing on the cake. I wanted to extend my viewing capabilities upstairs for [...]

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a look at some incredibly useful but undiscovered Mac apps. A few weeks ago, while on holiday in England I found myself in the awful position of having an iPad without any of my daughters travel videos loaded onto it. We were due to take a drive up to the north of England which would take hours. Normally, my wife and I use our iPad as a way of keeping my daughter entertained once all car games [...]

A while ago, we looked at Sparrow for the Mac. I downloaded the beta, put up with a rather rough first version, and then have enjoyed its slick and small interface. I was never a fan of Outlook. I found it just had too much information on the screen for an email client. Apple Mail is brilliant (despite many negative reviews online). It does Mail as good as any program out there. In my opinion Sparrow does it just that little bit better. Sparrow has [...]

Yesterday Apple unveiled what turned out to be the iPad 3. We wrote a little while back about the announcement that Apple were going to make regarding their new baby. Before the announcement, many of the bigger tech websites were drawing in hundreds of thousands of readers based on rumours, blurry photos from Chinese factories and just pure speculation. What would the new iPad have? A better display? 4G? A new dock connector? As we also mentioned before, some rumours are based on certainty. We [...]

  If you’ve got Lion installed, you might want to update it (using System Update) to the latest 10.7.3. As well as all the normal updates to your system and background files, you’ll also now be able to go Apple.com and grab a copy of Messages Beta. As long as you’ve got an Apple ID, you can use Messages to send SMS messages from your Mac to any other Mac (with Messages installed) or iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Although this doesn’t seem like a [...]

Ever since Apple announced iTunes Music Match, I’ve been dying to try it out. I love my music, and have over the years managed to accumulate thousands of songs. I have songs from a huge range of sources. I’ve ripped close to a thousand of my own CD’s. I have lots of songs bought off iTunes. I’ve got songs bought off various other vendor sites. I’ve even got some songs I converted from vinyl and tape from the 70′s and 80′s. So, if Apple are [...]

  For today’s article, I just wanted show a very quick demo of Alfred. As you can see, once you get used to Alfred, you can not only search your own Mac for things, but use Alfred to streamline actions that would ordinarily take a lot longer to do.