Facebook Releases Menubar Notifications App

Arvind Srinivasan — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:12:16 -0500

Warning: Any get-things-done lifestyle changes you have made up to this point may be nullified by this app.

A couple of Facebook developers, one working for Facebook, have developed a native Mac menubar app that shows you all of your Facebook notifications. Think of it as gmail notifier, except instead of getting, yknow, useful messages, you will get a Growl notification every time someone invites you to grow hydroponic wheatgrass in FarmVille.

This is along the lines of the Facebook for Adobe Air application, released a while back, that allows you to keep track of your newsfeed, but instead of being built in Adobe Air, which can be glitchy, this new app is developed in Cocoa. Furthermore, you can’t actually do anything with the dropdown menu; it merely provides links to the browser Facebook site.

The important part about this is that Facebook is opening up their APIs so that third-party applications can do more. Obviously, they realized that one of the major draws of Twitter is that you can quickly update your status from a number of desktop, mobile, and web apps, and it looks like they are hoping to win over some users with the same functionality.

If you fancy being even more distracted, give the Facebook Desktop Notifications App a whirl here.

The 10 Free Menubar Apps That You Didn’t Know About (But Should)

Arvind Srinivasan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:29:00 -0500

The OS X menubar is a strange beast. It never goes away, changes with every application, and most users couldn’t care less what is on or off it. However, there comes a time in every geek's life when the menubar is simply too...simple. Lucky for you, we have a list of the 10 best completely free applications that run solely from the menubar. Of course, if you are an organization freak, look elsewhere, because the multiple new icons WILL clutter up the otherwise pristine menubar, but we guarantee they will exponentially increase the usefulness of your Mac. To reduce the clutter, you can hold the command key while clicking on a menubar app, and drag it off. For example, unless you have a wicked Bluetooth-based secret lair, there is no particular reason why you have to keep Bluetooth in the menubar 24/7.

Dropbox

It seems as if every service is going to the cloud, with cloud backup, cloud operating systems, and most popular, cloud storage. There are a number of options in the cloud storage game, like SugarSync, Windows Live Sync, Windows Live Mesh, and Syncplicity, but Dropbox is the most feature rich, and is incredibly simple to maintain. When you install it, it creates a folder on your hard drive (you can also choose an existing folder) and will keep that folder in sync with all the Dropboxes on your different computers. Of course, you will need to install the Dropbox application on each computer you want to sync to, but with builds available for OS X, Windows, and Linux, it is an easy affair. If you are running Amiga OS, we can’t help you. Dropbox also has some additional features worth mentioning. You can share public links (albeit with slightly slow download speeds of about 75-100 kb/s) to any of your files, create a photo gallery viewable on www.getdropbox.com, and package and download your files easily from the Web interface.

Quick tip: If you want to sync files or folders to Dropbox without having to put them in the Dropbox folder, contrary to popular belief, you can. You need to use Terminal (Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type in the following command:

ln -s {Path to file or folder you want to sync} {Path to Dropbox directory}
For example, if we had a folder called ToBeSynced in my Documents folder, the command would be:

ln -s /Users/Arvind/Documents/ToBeSynced /Users/Arvind/Dropbox

VERY IMPORTANT - Keep a space between the two paths

You can download Dropbox here.

Visor

Nothing says “geek cred” like firing up the Terminal and controlling your friend’s computer with SSH. Nothing says “über-geek cred” like having the Terminal drop down, and then controlling your friend’s computer with SSH. Visor is essential for anyone that uses the Terminal frequently, as it allows you to assign a hotkey to bring it onto the screen. It will save your Terminal window without keeping the window open or having to keep it in the Dock. Visor requires the SIMBL plug-in, and full installation instructions can be found here.

iStat Menus

Some call us the RAM Nazi, and for good reason. We obsess over memory usage. Thus, we find ourselves in a conundrum, because if we keep Activity Monitor open to track application memory usage, we waste RAM by having it open. Also, we don’t like to admit to being neurotic. iStat Menus keeps track of not only RAM usage, but also CPU usage, hard drive temperature, hard drive space used, network usage, read/write speed, and a plethora of other esoteric information. There is probably a module that lets you monitor the Mars Rover (no promises). All of this information can be accessed through the menubar, and you can pick and choose exactly what to monitor. We liked the calendar and clock in iStat so much that we replaced the default OS X clock with it.

iStat menus can be downloaded here.

Caffeine

Have you ever had a 14-hour Hulu marathon, where you had to walk up to the computer and shake the mouse every 10 minutes when the screensaver popped up? Yeah, been there, done that. By default, Apple sets your screen to turn off after a fixed time, which is nice for the environment and your battery life, but incredibly annoying if you are letting your computer do something (i.e. showing a presentation, watching a movie, or running system maintenance for your death ray) that doesn’t require moving your mouse. Of course, you can always disable the screensaver and cancel the energy savings in System Preferences, but then Al Gore would come after you.

Luckily, a middle ground exists. Caffeine, a lightweight utility designed for one and only one purpose, as a toggle for screensaver and display-sleep settings. If you activate it, it will disable the two, deactivate it and regular power-saving settings will resume. We recommend letting it open on startup. Just remember to turn it off after your movie marathon is over, as a computer that cannot dim or turn off its screen will suck up a ton of electricity.

You can download Caffeine here.

LogMeIn

Click the screenshot to embiggen!

The screen-sharing feature in iChat is great if you have friends who have a Mac and you are exchanging tech support for favors, or if you are trying to show them something on your computer, but unfortunately, it is limited to people with OS X Leopard. For everyone else, screen sharing is a tedious and excessively techy affair, involving port forwarding, IP addresses, and VNC clients. LogMeIn is technically a Web app, but its general awesomeness, and the fact that the client software runs from the menubar, forced us to add it to this list. Essentially, LogMeIn allows you to add any of your computers (or friends’ computers) to your remote sharing list. Any time that the host computer is running the client software, you can share their screen, provided, of course, you have their username and password. A more practical use, though, is installing it on your home machine so that you can access your files from work / evil lair / Starbucks.

LogMeIn has both a browser plug-in (for viewing) and a client application, and can be downloaded here.

Mail Unread Menu OR Google Notifier

If you use OS X’s built-in Mail application, you know one of the greatest things about it is that it badges the number of unread messages in your inbox on its icon in the Dock. That said, if you hide your Dock, this advantage is meaningless. Mail Unread Menu fixes this problem by putting a new mail indicator conveniently on, guess what, the menubar. It also adds more customization features, like selecting a specific folder to monitor.

Mail Unread Menu can be downloaded here.

Alternatively, if you use Gmail on a Mac but don’t like desktop mail clients, the Google Notifier for Mac offers the same functionality, but connects directly to the Web version of the service. It also offers slick Google Calendar integration, reminding you of all the tasks you put off in favor of reading this post. Don’t worry, though, it was totally worth it.

Google Notifier can be downloaded here.

MozyHome

Time Machine is great as a home backup solution because it is so simple to use -- you plug in a huge hard drive, and it backs up all your data every hour. However, those without an external hard drive or a fear of messing up the space-time continuum have other options (check out our detailed review of all your cloud backup options). MozyHome is feature rich, free for up to 2GB of storage, and runs from the menubar, backing up select folders to MozyHome’s offsite data centers.

MozyHome can be downloaded here.

Echodio

Dropbox is great for syncing files that don’t require any particular organizational structure, but can be a pain if you want to sync things that require structure, like iTunes libraries. Echodio offers the same essential syncing functionality, but integrates seamlessly with iTunes, meaning that you can sync playlists and music while preserving the metadata and tagging information. This means the Hannah Montana album you renamed to show up as Iron Maiden will stay that way, saving you from embarrassment (no promises -- if you listen to her music, it is bound to catch up with you someday).

Echodio is free and can be downloaded here.

EverSave

While OS X is not as prone to crashes as, say, Windows, there are still times when you wish you had saved that document but forgot to. EverSave is there to save you every time, automatically saving documents for you. It is very customizable, as you can set it to save on timed intervals or on every application switch, and decide which applications it will monitor. We would only suggest that if you are saving on intervals, you set the interval to a sizeable number, so it’s not saving constantly. If you are using an application like Pages, for example, every time you save a document, a progress bar pops up that renders the application useless.

EverSave can be downloaded here.

pulpTunes

While the developers may be a tad confused with their nomenclature, their product itself is great. It has nothing to do with oranges or pulp, even if the logo suggests otherwise, and instead creates a webpage that can stream all of your iTunes music (or a select amount) in Flash. The application is simple: You launch it, designate a port for it to listen to (15000 is default) and then you can navigate to it in your favorite Web browser and listen to your music. Obviously, it is of no use to listen to it on the same computer that the music is actually stored on, but if you forward the port to that computer, and set up a domain for yourself, you can listen to your music anywhere. You can choose to share this website with anyone, or create user accounts for people to log in and listen. Once on the website, you can download any of the music on the site, search for specific tracks, and filter by genre, artist, and song. However, with great power comes great responsibility. Don’t download tracks that will make the RIAA come after you with a pitchfork and torch.

pulpTunes can be downloaded here.

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Facebook Releases Menubar Notifications App

The 10 Free Menubar Apps That You Didn’t Know About (But Should)