Years went by without a peep from the developer, until…

Meteorologist has finally been updated to work with Yosemite and El Capitan. Completely re-written in Swift, the new version looks the same, but works much better.

I like that I can get a snapshot of the weather where I live, where I work, and a number of other cities with a click of an icon in the menubar—without all the data-sucking maps and doc-dads of other weather apps. If you’re looking for a weather app, I encourage you to give it a try.

Itsycal is a tiny calendar for your Mac’s menu bar. It adds one function that has been missing on the Mac from day one, and one that has driven me crazy for years.

Itsycal will display a monthly calendar, as well as your calendar events from the Mac Calendar app. Events are highlighted on the calendar, and you can also create and delete (but not edit) events.

Itsycal is a lightweight app and is free of charge.

A few years back I had an app that would show a simple calendar icon in the menubar which when clicked would drop down a simple calendar of the current month. It did nothing else, but it was useful to me to be able to see a full month calendar. But it stopped working long ago. I gave up looking for a simple replacement.

A few days ago I came across Pop-Calendar from Magnesium-App. Pop-Calendar is a free utility that placed the date in a calendar icon in your menubar. When you click the icon, you can view the entire year at once or single month view (click the screenshot above for a larger view) by clicking on the month name. Pop-Calendar will remember which you view you used last, but you can switch at any time.

Pop-Calendar uses Apple’s built-in Calendar app to display all your events in either view. When you click on an individual day, you can see the day’s events. You can also add new calendar events simply by clicking a small + icon at the top of the pop-up window that appears when clicking on a day.

Pop-Calendar offers the ability to set a keyboard shortcut to show the window, as well as the ability to turn on and off individual calendars from Apple’s Calendar app. That’s all there is to it, and that’s why I love it!

Beside being free, simple to use, and easy on the eyes, it already works in Mac OS X Yosemite—though I do hope the developer adds transparency once Yosemite ships in the fall. Pop-Calendar is available directly from the developer’s site, or in the Mac App Store.

Significator for iTunes is a simple application to control iTunes. It combines simplicity and functionality. It’s a menu-bar app, so you never loose focus of what you’re currently doing if you just want to quickly choose a specific song. With Notification-Center you can always see what song is playing, if it has changed. The application supports global shortcuts and multi-touch gestures to make navigating through your library even easier.

There are plenty of iTunes controllers out there, but Significator looks great (it is Retina-ready) and is completely free! I’ve been using it for a few months and love it! Grab Significator from the Mac App Store.

The lorem ipsum text is typically a section of a Latin text by Cicero with words altered, added and removed that make it nonsensical in meaning and not proper Latin.

As designers, we all use it. There are web-based lorem ipsum genererators, but they’re all a pain to use because you have to launch a browser and go to the site to use them. It adds unnecessary steps. There has to be a better solution. Enter LittleIpsum.

LittleIpsum generates just the right amount of filler text

LittleIpsum is a Mac OS X Menubar app that does only one thing, but does it very well. It provides you with one-click access (via your clipboard) of single words, multiple sentences, or entire paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum text. After clicking the Menubar icon, you simply drag your mouse over the amount of text you want copied to your clipboard. It can even wrap your chosen text in HTML tags by right-clicking on the Menubar icon.

LittleIpsum uses very little of your system resources, supports Growl Notifications, and doesn’t require an Internet connection to work. Best of all, it’s absolutely free.

You can grab LittleIpsum on the Mac App Store, or via the link on the developer’s website. I love LittleIpsum because it’s easy to use, always accessible and doesn’t try to be more than what it should be.

The applications listed below contains a few “old timers” and several Johnny-Come-Lately apps that have found a permanent home on my Mac.

Snapz Pro X

The last few years has seen several fancy-pants screen capture utilities come to market. They all look spectacular, but I’ve stayed with Snapz Pro X because it offers the perfect balance of features at a reasonable price. Snapz Pro X offers everything you would expect in a screen capture utility, with the added ability to capture video and audio of your Mac’s screen (a feature I love to use when a web site attempts to prevent downloading of audio or video!). When it comes to static image capture of your screen, Snapz Pro can capture your entire screen, specific windows, or user definable portions of your screen with a keyboard shortcut, and save it in a number of formats. It also gives you the ability to keep the cursor visible, keep or remove drop shadows, add watermarks, and much more. Snapz Pro X with video capture capability costs you $69 and is well worth it if you do a lot of screen captures.

Transmit

Panic released an all-encompassing FTP and coding app called Coda, but for simplicity, reliability and features, you can’t beat Transmit for your file transfer needs. Transmit handles FTP, SFTP, WebDav and more. I’ve been using it for years and had no reliability issues. The latest version offers plenty of new features, but the base feature set of uploading files and making minor edits to my HTML and CSS has been enough to keep it installed on my Mac for a long time. One really handy feature is the ability to create a “Droplet” you can keep on your desktop or in your Dock which automatically uploads any file(s) you drop on it to the specified FTP site. It’s fantastic if you frequently upload files to the same server. There are free FTP apps out there, but for $34 Transmit is a bargain.

Courier

Now you might wonder why I would need another file upload application when I just told you how great Transmit is. Courier handles drag and drop file uploading to FTP just like Transmit, but also adds the ability to upload images to Flickr, TwitPic and Facebook, videos to Vimeo, and files to Amazon S3 and MyCloudApp. The application is beautiful to look at, but beneath that beauty is a handy history feature that shows you which files you’ve uploaded to what service, and where that server is located by plotting its location on a map. You’ll also be provided with an active link to the files you upload. If you don’t need more robust FTP features, Courier is a steal at $19.95.

MagiCal

I mentioned in Part 2 that Apple hasn’t offered much in the way of improvements to the Open and Save dialog boxes. Another area that hasn’t improved is the Clock in the menubar. Apple did give us the ability to add the date, but it’s still lacking usefulness for me. Windows offers a full calendar in the menubar’s clock. MagiCal for the Mac fixes this shortcoming by giving you a host of options for displaying the date and time in your Mac’s menubar. While there are apps that will also add the ability to view iCal events and ToDo items in the calendar, MagiCal does this simple task without adding overhead to the system with features I don’t necessarily need. MagiCal is absolutely free.

MainMenu

MainMenu is another menubar application that I’ve come to love which places a number of Mac maintenance options at your disposal. With the click of a button you can rebuild your Spotlight index, force empty the trash when pesky files just won’t go away, repair permissions, clean system and user caches, repair and eject volumes, and much more. While all of these utilities are available via the Terminal (as well as other full applications like Onyx), MainMenu keeps them all readily available in a single menubar icon for only $19.00.

TotalFinder

Mac users have been asking for tabs in Mac OS X’s Finder about as long as we’ve had tabs in our web browsers. TotalFinder finally brings this much requested feature, and a whole lot more. Once installed, TotalFinder lives in your Finder Preferences window an allows you to not only add tabs to your Finder windows, but adds a number of other features as well. One of those features is also Cut & Paste, a feature Windows users have enjoyed forever. With TotalFinder installed, you can also set your windows to display folders on top, view invisible files with a keyboard shortcut, and display dual tabbed windows in a single unified window – with a Finder sidebar on each side. Along with a few more features, TotalFinder is a great buy at only $15.

Skitch

For years I used ImageWell to quickly edit an image for uploading to discussion forums because ImageShack and other image upload services were littered with ads and too cumbersome to work with. When I had the opportunity to try Skitch, I was sold immediately. Skitch is a combination of a desktop app and a web-based image sharing service. The app is a simple image editor, allowing you to draw simple shapes, add some text, and size your image. Once you do that, you can upload the image to the Skitch website where you have your own personal dashboard. Your images are saved in the application’s history, and have the URL to the image copied to the clipboard. Your Skitch dashboard also offers links to the image, and even formats them for HTML coding or discussion forum formatting. Skitch is free for basic use if you don’t want any of the Plus features.

Microsoft Office 2011

I know, how could any respectable Mac user install MS Office 2011 on their Mac when iWork is available at half the cost. I agreed with that for a few years, using iWork to write my articles for Macworld and TheAppleBlog. But what I found was that iWork is so simple to use that it’s almost difficult. Yeah, that’s right, it’s too easy. Too many features are hidden behind multiple clicks or simply don’t exist at all – where with MS Office 2001, they’re right in the Ribbon at the top of the screen for one click access. Then there’s the whole compatibility issue – which for me is a big deal. Office 2011 has been greatly improved over previous versions, especially in the area of speed. And if you need compatibility with an Exchange server, the addition of MS Outlook makes Office a no-brainer. MS Office costs $280 for the Home & Office edition, or $149 for the Home & Student edition which does not include Outlook. I look forward to seeing what Apple comes up with for the next version of iWork, but until then, I’ll stick with MS Office 2011.

HyperDock

Like TotalFinder, HyperDock aims to fill the gaps Apple left in Mac OS X’s Finder. HyperDock’s primary function is to add preview thumbnails to the windows open in any given app in your Dock. Beyond that though, HyperDock offers a few even more useful features to customize your user experience. You can view iCal events when hovering over the iCal icon in the Dock, and control iTunes when over that icon. But for me, the killer features are the Window Management options. HyperDock allows you to enable Window Snapping – which automatically sizes your window to fill half the screen and moves it to the appropriate edge when you move a window to the edge of your screen. This is especially useful for laptop users. Another great feature is the ability to move and resize application and Finder windows from any edge, not just the titlebar. This feature is great for users with a large LCD screen – saving a lot of scrolling! All these features should be built-in to the Mac OS. Until they are, HyperDock is free while still in beta.

Alfred

Last but not least is Alfred, a multi-use utility for launching apps, documents and folder, as well as searching the web from your desktop. There are other apps like it, QuickSilver pioneered the idea, Google has their version, and their are numerous takes on the idea from other developers – but non is as simple and good looking as Alfred. While Apple’s own Spotlight can do some of what Alfred does, I really love working with Alfred because it offers so much more in the way of working with apps. For example, you can search for a file and attach it to a new email with the email address of the person you want to send it to – all without leaving the small Alfred window. Alfred also keeps a history of your clipboard, lets you control iTunes, and has a host of new features on the way to work with more applications. The basic Alfred app is free, with a PowerPack adding numerous features for only 12 British Pounds, which is about $23 US dollars.

This concludes the 3 part series. I hope there was at least one app in the 3 articles that you didn’t know about and now find useful. If not, share your favorite apps with everyone in the comments. I know I’m always on the lookout for great new apps for my Mac!

I normally ignore such fluff, but this past week I managed to come up with a list of a few things that I think Apple should build-in to Mac OS X to make me happy. Because you know if I want it, chances are that everyone else on the planet does too, right?

Mac OS X doesn't trust me!

For starters Apple, since I’m smarter than your average rock and managed to set up my Mac’s user account with administrative privileges, can you please stop asking me for my God-foresaken password every time I want to install something? Please! I get it, security and all that. But I’ve set myself up as an admin user for a reason. Can you at least offer the option of not asking me for a password? I know, enabling that feature will require me to enter my password, but that’s ok this one time!

Wait Apple, don’t run off just yet, I’ve got more.

I’ve not been a huge fan of Apple’s Spaces feature on my MacPro – a 30″ LCD allows me plenty of space. But on my 13″ MacBook Pro I have little screen real estate, so I use Spaces quite a bit. One thing that bothers me to no end is that there appears to be no way to not show the icons on my desktop in any given Space. I would really love to have desktop icons only show up in one specific Space, and no others. I tried adding the Finder to show up only in Space 2, but of course that does nothing – and you can’t select individual folders to show up in specific spaces.

Mac OS X Dashboard on a diet

Dashboard has suffered the wrath of “we just don’t care” from Apple for a long time. Windows 7 offers a form of Dashboard widgets in a nice floating dock on the side of your screen, a feature I like because it doesn’t take over my entire screen. It sure would be great to have Dashboard slide in to view from the side of the screen at a specified size like you see above – keeping the rest of my desktop in place and usable, and stay there until I hit a keyboard shortcut to send it away

Speaking of features that could do so much more, how about you do something with the built-in disc burn function. I can overlook the lame font management, but burning a CD or DVD on the Mac only has one truly good option, Roxio Toast Titanium. Start by not making a full copy of everything I want to burn – which takes up more time than it should, then doubling the time to actually burn the files. And how about some options like custom icons and window backgrounds. There are apps that can do it, such as DMG Canvas (which is an awesome little utility, by the way), but it’s a simple function that should be built-in.

Another seemingly simple feature that everyone in the world wants, but you haven’t delivered on is improving the menubar clock/calendar. As you can see below on the left side of the image, it’s not very functional.

OS X's worthless menubar clock vs. MenuCalendarClock for iCal

How difficult can it be to add a mini-calendar to the menubar item? This is another feature in Windows that I love, but requires a third party application like MenuCalendarClock for iCal (as seen on the right side of the image above). Notice the word “iCal” in that name? Good, because it needs to have iCal integration, showing me a dot on a date that has an iCal event on it, as well as my ToDo List at the bottom. This would really be a huge boost in productivity – because launching iCal every time I just want to see what day the 23rd of the month falls on is quite annoying!

Moving on to the iPhone, how about you allow me to use all 16 icon slots in iOS folders, rather than the 12 you currently do? Four more icons would make a big difference to me, so obviously the rest of the world benefit as well!

And finally, why is it that we’ve come as far as iOS 4 and I’m still finding apps that don’t allow you to rotate the phone to get a landscape keyboard? I’m speaking about apps like Foursquare, among many others. For cryin’ out loud, what is the freakin’ hold up? I know, the app-maker has to code it in the app, right? Why not just get rid of the vertical keyboard completely, since we all know nobody uses it anyway.

So there you are, my wish list for Mac OS X 10.7. I’m sure you can get them all done, it shouldn’t take more than an hour or two, right?

SecondBar is a small utility that does exactly what you would expect, it adds a Mac OS X menubar to your second monitor; giving you full access to your Apple, File, Edit, View, Go, Window and Help menus, as well as placing a clock in the far right position.

What it will not give you is all the additional menubar application icons you may be used to, such as TimeMachine, Airport, DropBox, etc., as you can see in the screenshot below.

Standard Mac OS X menubar on top, SecondBar's menubar on the bottom

Now if you don’t have a second monitor, or you do have one and don’t see the need for a second menubar, you still might find a great use for this app – as I did.

SecondBar adds a killer feature to Mac OS X’s Finder, which is the ability to move and resize windows with the click of the mouse. As you can see in the screenshot below, the SecondBar preferences allow you to customize actions when clicking on the window action widgets in the upper left corner of each window.

SecondBar offers window size & position customization

This feature alone was enough to sell me on the app. With a 30″ LCD screen, I really don’t need a second monitor (though I do have one), but the ability to automatically size and move two windows to fill both sides of my screen is fantastically handy!

SecondBar is free of charge, but does come with an utterly annoying problem. If you DON’T have the second menubar showing (yes, you can turn it off for use with one monitor), you can’t access the preferences or quit the app – at least, I couldn’t find a way. This forces you to launch Activity Monitor and quit it there. Still, SecondBar is an incredibly useful application for those with a second monitor, and even those who don’t.