40Tech

Early in my Mac life, I looked at ten apps that were essential to me at the time. Looking at that list, I realize that my usage has changed a bit over time. Since then, the Mac App Store was born as well. A recent post by Dan Gold on Google+ inspired me to try to list my ten favorite App Store apps. It was hard narrowing that list down to just ten, and even harder ranking these from 1 to 10. Here’s what I came up with.

As I continue my now year-old journey as a Mac user, I’ve blogged about a few tips that I’ve stumbled upon, such as how to drag text onto your desktop and change it into a text note, how to reveal the dock and menu bar when using full screen apps in Lion, and how to add folders to the Finder sidebar. Many of these tips are probably “Duh!” moments to seasoned Mac users, but for those of us who come from the Windows world, they aren’t so obvious. It’s time to add another simple but important one to the list – how to change your Mac’s default email client and web browser.

If you want to squeeze every last ounce of speed out of your browsing experience, then check out the latest browser speed tests at Tom’s Hardware. The site takes a look at several browsers on both the PC and on a Mac, and offers results in several different categories. The site then crowned a winner on each platform, as well as overall.

Now is the time of year when many of us are traveling for the holidays. With that comes the need to remotely access our home computers. We’ve covered two of our favorite remote access solutions in the past, and even pondered whether remote access apps were becoming irrelevant, now that so much of our data is in the cloud. If you have a Mac running Lion, and do need to access your Mac remotely, you don’t even need to use a third-party solution. Back to My Mac, previously a paid service as part of Mobile Me, is now free with Lion. If you can get past the fact that it only works between Macs, it’s awesome. I’ve found it to be the most seamless and pleasant remote access solution yet.

Fantastical is a calendaring app for the Mac that makes entering appointments quick and easy. The idea behind Fantastical is that you can enter your appointments using natural language. Open up the entry dialog via either the toolbar or a key combination, and just type naturally. Fantastical takes care of the rest. For example, if you type “Meet with Joe at the office on Thursday at noon,” Fantastical will plug all of the appointment details into the correct slot in a calendar entry, using a slick user interface.

Lately, I’ve been seeing how well I can survive without Flash on my MacBook Air. I find my browsing experience to be faster without it, but every now and then I need Flash to use a site. We previously talked about how to watch many YouTube videos without having Flash installed on your system, but what about other sites that use Flash? My setup involves using Firefox as my main browser on my MacBook Air (I use Chrome on my iMac), and switching over to Chrome when I need Flash. Chrome has Flash built in. My setup lets me automatically open my Firefox tab in Chrome, which supports Flash by default, by using a keystroke. Here’s how.

Every now and then, a third party developer comes up with an app that provides functionality that should have been baked into an operating system to begin with. Yoink is one such app. If you’re like me when I use my MacBook Air, you might place each app into its own desktop, and use the trackpad to swipe back and forth between them. This can make it tricky, though, to drag files or images between apps. Yoink makes it easy.

If you come from the Windows world, uninstalling apps on a Mac might seem a bit odd to you. Unlike in Windows, where you go through a whole uninstall process, on a Mac there are no such hoops to jump through. To uninstall a Mac app, you simply highlight it in your application folder, and trash it. The problem, though, is that many Mac apps leave behind preference files and other breadcrumbs, even after you delete them. To remove all traces of an app from your Mac, delete it using AppCleaner.

Ask any computer expert, and she will stress the need for not only local backups, but offsite backups as well. One option to get offsite backups is to use an online service. For many years, I was a happy subscriber to Carbonite. As the number of computers in my household grew, however, I needed a more economical solution. My wife and I each had a desktop and laptop, and I also ran a Windows virtual machine on one of my Macs. That made five systems that I needed to backup. After a bit of research, I settled on CrashPlan, and haven’t looked back. Not only is the CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited plan a good choice for a family with many computers, but CrashPlan might also be a good choice for you if you don’t want to pay anything at all.

Although Apple’s new iPhone did not electrify either the media or the stock market quite so much as Apple might have hoped, it has certainly proved popular with their most vital audience: the consumers, who have made it the most successful iPhone launch ever, with 4 million sales already. It’s achieved worldwide success, including unprecedented penetration in the Chinese market.

Many people probably picked up the 4S for the Siri Personal Assistant, or the much-improved 8Mp camera, or just because it’s fun to have the very latest high-end phone. Hopefully they will sooner or later appreciate the true power of this new handset, which goes far beyond what we’ve come to expect in smartphones, particularly in several areas crucial to gaming: notably processor power, graphics chip, and the possibilities unlocked by the iCloud and AirPlay services.