Freeloader Friday Download of the Week
Menu Bar Madness!
Digital Bill from the Wizards of Technology fills in for Brian
Ever since we've moved up to Mac OS X we've had a lot more stuff that we can do up there in the menubar. There was always the Clock, Volume, Displays, and iChat Status. And sure, Panther added Fast User Switching, and Tiger ads the Spotlight search bar. And what mobile user doesn't have the Airport Signal Meter and Battery gauges? But, thanks to the hard work of shareware authors, you can add functions to the menu bar you never dreamed of, from email notification, to processor and memory use, to text shortcuts and even desktop cleanup.
Read on for some of my daily favorites.
DeskTopple
Ever
needed to take a screenshot and had to remove all of those icons from your
Desktop before you do? Or maybe you needed to make a presentation and had to
tidy up before hooking into the projector? With Desktopple,
you can quickly and easily hide all of your Desktop clutter. A quick trip to
your menu bar is all it takes. With Desktopple, you can quickly and easily
hide all of your Desktop clutter. Desktopple is a deceptively simple idea -
cover all your desktop clutter. Yep. Just sweep it under the rug. It can even
use your desktop picture to hide the mess.
Textpander is
a utility that helps you type more efficiently and more accurately (thank goodness!).
Textpander 'listens' to what you type and inserts predefined text snippets
on the fly whenever you enter their corresponding abbreviations.
Here are a few examples for what you can do with Textpander:
- Insert standard greetings, text fragments, and signatures - including formatted text and pictures.
- Insert the current date and time in any format you prefer.
- Use editor-independent code templates and have Textpander position the cursor just where it needs to be.
- Type special characters without having to launch any special characters palette.
- Have Textpander correct typos automatically.
- Import text snippets from other typing utilities.
Textpander quickly becomes one of those things you miss when it's not there.
I certainly wouldn't finish posting nightly podcasts as fast without it!
The Gmail
Notifier is
an application that alerts you when you have new Gmail messages (You *do* have
a Gmail account, right?). It displays an icon in your Menu bar to let you
know if you have unread Gmail messages, and shows you their subjects, senders
and snippets, all without your having to open a web browser. Then you can go
straight to the message, or the inbox, or to compose a new message (all of
which require a web browser of course).
The Notifier is in beta, like everything from Google. Before you download
it, we encourage you to review the system requirements and privacy information.
MenuMeters is
a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for Mac OS X. Although
there are numerous other programs which do the same thing, they always were
either crouching or hidden. Some were even odd pulsing things on the desktop.
MenuMeters takes up precious little space on the menu bar, and gives me quick-click
access to stuff like how much hard disk is used up with swapfiles (sometimes
2GB!), or what my uptime is, or if there are more than 1000 pageswaps when
I'm playing WoW - good signs that a restart will make the game play with less
lag!.
The MenuMeters monitors are true Menu
Extras. This means they can be reordered using command-drag and remember their
positions in the menubar across logins and restarts.
Downloads from MacUpdate.com
All personal comments should be sent to the author. All other discussion should be done in the Forums
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