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.
