The Graphic Mac

If you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, your battery is vital to the usefulness of the machine. While Apple offers you basic information about your battery life, little information is displayed about the overall health of the battery. This is where coconutBattery comes in.

coconutBattery is a simple utility that goes beyond just showing you the current charge of your MacBook’s battery. You might say it gives your battery a complete physical exam. coconutBattery can show you the current maximum capacity of the battery compared to what it was when you first took it out of the box; perfect for anyone who’s thought “the battery used to last longer.”

coconutBattery offers a wealth of information about your laptop's battery

The diagnostics don’t stop there. You can get a better idea of how many complete charge cycles are left in the life of your battery by checking the loadcycles (how many times you’ve fully charged your battery) – useful because every battery has a set amount of full battery charges before it just doesn’t charge anymore.

If you’re a multiple-laptop family, you’ve no doubt been faced with the question “is that the MacBook charger or my wife’s MacBook Pro’s charger?” coconutBattery can let you know if you’ve plugged your laptop in with the wrong charger.

coconutBattery is a free, Universal Binary you can download here.

When tabs finally found their way into Web browsers some years ago, people immediately fell in love with them. In fact, most people wonder how someone could live without them. With Apple’s love for a minimalist interface, you have to wonder why we still don’t have them on the desktop. Whatever the reason, we’ve been left to wait for a third-party solution.

Thankfully, a creative and persistent developer has finally figured out a way to add them into Mac OS X’s Finder without completely replacing the look, feel and functionality of the Finder in the process.

Tabs in Mac OS X's Finder windows

TotalFinder, a SIMBL application by BinaryAge adds elegant tabs, borrowed from Google Chrome, to Mac OS X’s Finder windows. The tabs look, feel and act like tabs in your Web browser for the most part. Along with the tabbed windows (seen above in the screenshot), TotalFinder also adds a few other really cool features.
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If you happen to be lucky enough to have a second monitor hooked-up to your Mac, you’ve no doubt wished you could access your menubar on the second monitor at some point. While Apple doesn’t give you this feature, and likely never will, a simple little app brings most of the functionality you’re looking for, and more.

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.
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If you regularly use iMovie or some other application to capture audio or video, or were wondering how to do it on the cheap, then you’ll love this handy little tip.

Video Capture with Quicktime Player

All you’ll need is a copy of Quicktime Pro 7 or later, or the latest version of Quicktime Player in Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and a Mac with an iSight camera, or a connected video camera or microphone.
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Sometimes a little info goes a long, long way. While you can do a Get Info (Command + i) on a selected file, it would be easier if you could see just a little info without the hassle of a keyboard command – such as how many files are contained in a particular folder, or the dimensions of an image file. Once again, Apple thought of the little things.

A quick visit to the Finder’s menubar does the trick! Simply go to View>Show View Options (or hit Command + J). In the View Options window about half-way down, click in the checkbox next to Show Item Info as seen in the screenshot at the right.

Once that option is activated in the Finder, you’ll notice information located just below the desktop icon file name colored in light blue. When you’re in icon view mode in a folder, which you can switch to by hitting Command + 1, you’ll see the info there too. As you can see in the screenshot at the left, you’ll get a quick glimpse of the number of items inside a folder, and the pixel dimensions of image files.

Not all document types display information, but these two in particular I find quite useful.

There are tons of sites out there you can use to customize your Mac OS X experience. From themes and icons, to desktop wallpapers and app skins, the options are limitless. But spending the time to find them is daunting.

iconpaper offers everything you need to customize your Mac

Iconpaper is a fantastic site that brings the best of the bunch all together in one easy to use site. Iconpaper offers easy viewing and downloading of everything you need, including:

• Icons
• Wallpapers
• Dock Skins
• App Skins
• OS X Themes
• Screensavers

I found so many Dock themes and desktops to try, I ended up wasting away an hour before I finished writing this brief article.

Alien Skin Software storewide sale to benefit Haiti

Alien Skin Software today announces the immediate start of a store-wide sale to benefit Haiti. From now through February 28th, 2010, everything in the Web store is 20% off. 10% of Alien Skin Software’s profits for the entire month of February (not just from the sale) will be also be donated to Haiti through the Red Cross and the Community Coalition for Haiti. This is on top of significant donations already made by the company and individual employees.

“I am confident that the sale will generate a significant donation to Haiti relief funds,” said Jeff Butterworth, CEO of Alien Skin Software. “I also encourage everyone to donate blood. There is no substitute for this precious resource. I do it for the free cookies and bright bandage to show off around the office!”

Alien Skin, maker of Eye Candy – perhaps one of the most popular filter sets for Photoshop of all time, has been one of my favorite design-related software makes for many years. In particular, I LOVE Blow Up 2 for enlarging images to huge sizes, and Bokeh for creating awesome focus and depth-of-field effects with your photos.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s faster to talk than it is to type. But after decades of tried and failed attempts by several software vendors, Mac OS X is still left without a viable solution in the speech-to-text arena.

If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch though, you’re no longer left out in the cold. And better yet, it won’t cost you a dime!

Nuance has a version of Dragon Dictation for both devices that works superbly. I dictated this article on my iPod Touch using Dragon Dictation with only one minor error.

The only major complaint is that the app has a time limit of 20-seconds on the length of the recording that gets converted into text, making it cumbersome for lengthy speech-to-text conversions.

The app requires a second or third-generation iPod Touch or iPhone with a microphone (Apple’s built-in headphone/mic combo works fine), and an Internet connection (WiFi or 3G works more than adequately, though Edge is a bit slower, obviously). The Internet connection is necessary because the app actually uploads the data to the Nuance servers for the translation.

Dragon Dictation is easy to use, requiring only a tap of a button to do its job

Using Dragon Dictation is easy. You simply hit the Record button and speak. When the recording hits the 20-second mark, or you stop speaking, the app converts the recording to text. If you have a long email or message to dictate, you’ll have to hit the record button again to continue adding to the text. When you’re finished, you can copy the text to the clipboard, send it as a text message or email it.

Dragon Dictation is free, and is available from the iTunes store.