Rating: 4/5

Over the last few day I have had the pleasure of playing and reviewing Check It from SmithMicro Software. Check it is a system performance suite for mac that allows you to unclutter, backup and maintain your mac. It includes 3 applications, EMC Retrospect Express, Spring Cleaning and TechTool Platinum.

Spring Cleaning is an application that allows you to clean up your computer and remove unnecessary applications, documents, pictures, movie or other files. There are three feature that I find to be most important, a feature called sizemanager that allows you to have a graphical view of all the file’s sizes on your mac. There is also the Secure Delete feature that securely deletes sensitive information. I also like the quick compare feature which allows you to quickly spot differences in files.

EMC Retrospect Express is a backup application designed to simply, quickly and easily backup your files. It allows you to backup to internal or external hard drives, flash media drives including “thumb drives” and DVD/CDs. Retrospect has an amazing Fast Backup feature which analyzes your files on your first backup, and for subsequent backups, only backups the changed files, making a quick, easy backup. Another great feature is the ability to backup preferences and settings.

TechTool Platinum is a great app for maintaining and checking your mac. If you mac ever gets into an unbootable state, just boot from your edrive, a mini partition containing a mini version of OS X, just enough to get your mac backup and running. You can preform comprehensive tests on your macintosh from right inside the application.

Overall Check it is a great suite of applications and I highly recommend it to users who want to keep their macintosh in tip top condition.

Price: ?Ǭ†$99.99
Site:?Ǭ†http://www.smithmicro.com/default.tpl?group=product_full&sku=CKTSSCD

Rating: 4/5

Syndicating RSS feeds is not typically handled like email. Cyndicate’s main difference from other RSS readers is that it handles storing articles and other RSS item almost exactly like an email client. Say you find an interesting, but long, article on some Mac news item, Cyndicate allows you to not just flag it, but label it with a color and move it to a folder for later reading. This method also makes for a very competent way of archiving your favorite articles over time. Cyndicate’s search feature is very reminiscent of Apple Mail. Reading your RSS feeds offline is another very compelling feature that migrated its way from Apple Mail. In my opinion, the most useful feature in Cyndicate is Smart Folders. Smart Folders can automatically categorize articles, instead of the more time consuming use of Folders. Users of the discontinued app PulpFiction will definitely want to try Cyndicate, as Cyndicate’s feature-set is based on PulpFiction. Cyndicate is nicely thought out; it even does some things differently when the option key is held down.

The extent of work to setup the Filters feature and the fact that it’s hidden in the preferences is one aspect that doesn’t seem well thought out. Many people hate email for a reason. Cyndicate carries over some of the pains of email to RSS reading. The intimidation of an inbox filled with 1000+ articles aside, some people don’t care about saving news for later and having large archives. Because of this, Cyndicate is not for everyone. You have to use the trial edition first to truly see if you prefer this approach.

Version Reviewed: 1.0.1

Price: $29.95

Site: http://cynicalpeak.com/cyndicate/

Rating: 4/5

Bin It is a great app that acts as a trashcan, but not in your dock. You can set it to stay on the desktop, float, or keep on top of all windows. Drag a file into the trash and it’ll automatically put it in your trash. It shows how many items are currently in the trash and how big the data is in your trash. It shows a certain amount of trash in it’s trash icon for how much data you really have in your trash. You can make the icon opaque or transparent, or somewhere inbetween the two. Double clicking the icon opens your trash in the Finder. You can make the icon small or large too. It’s a great companion for someone who hides their dock, or if they want to know how many items and their size in the trash on demand.?Ǭ†?Ǭ†

Version Reviewed: 1.3.1

Price: ?Ǭ†$12.50?Ǭ†

Site:?Ǭ†http://www.fastforwardsw.com/products/binit/

?Ǭ†?Ǭ†?Ǭ†

Rating: 4.5/5

Licensed is a nice little app that does one thing ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù gives you a place to log your software licenses. There are some others out there that have a few more bells and whistles however, this is a very nice little app for free.

The one thing it’s lacking is the ability to grab or include an email directly. At least, I haven’t found a way to do that. You can cut and paste the content of an email but there are some more sophisticated licensing methods that require the original email to activate the actual license.

But, other than that it has all the right fields for filling out the information for your ever increasing horde of applications & licenses.

It’s fast, simple and efficient.

Version Reviewed: 1.0b1

Price:Free

Site:http://amarsagoo.info/licensed/

Rating: 4/5

General Info: While syncing is often a sticky issue, Spanning Sync does it transparently and flawlessly. What Spanning Sync synchronizes is iCal and Google Calendar events. What’s so powerful about Spanning Sync is its bidirectional syncing. Bidirectional syncing means that data created, edited, and deleted on Google Calendar will be synced with iCal, and vice versa. Spanning Sync can sync automatically every 10 minutes, 30 minutes, hour, day, or week (also in addition to, or instead of, manually syncing). You can also chose if calendars are synced, and which opposing calendar they’re synced to. Syncing is entirely transparent except when when Google Calendar changes a certain amount of iCal data (normally 50%). Besides the increased accessibility, Google Calendar adds a more convenient way to add shared or third-party calendars; such as holidays or concerts. Through iCal, Spanning Sync allows you to sync Google Calendar events to your iPod, iPhone, or other mobile device.

In addition to the previously mentioned features, Spanning Sync needs some more. One that I really missed was a way to merge calendars. Say I had two Google calendars of national holidays and religious holidays (no, not Apple), Spanning Sync could then merge them into one iCal calendar called ?¢‚Ǩ?ìHolidays?¢‚Ǩ¬ù. What I feel Spanning Sync is missing most is a way to sync to-dos with Google Calendar. As Google Calendar lacks to-dos, Spanning Sync doesn’t sync them at all. Still, Spanning Sync should take to-dos with a due date from iCal and make them events in Google Calendar (similar to this). One item bothering many potential buyers of Spanning Sync is its cost. Because Spanning Sync is commonly viewed as an application, rather than a service, a yearly fee or one-time, expensive “unlimited license” is commonly seen as overpriced. Exacerbating the situation further is the ridiculously low prominence of the prices and plans available on Spanning Sync’s website. Spanning Sync works great, but could use some more features and better prices (by about $5-15 less).

Retail Prices: $25 per year or $65 unlimited

Site: http://spanningsync.com/

Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: All Macs need maintenance performed. Unlike cars, they usually need software maintenance like emptying caches, repairing permissions, changing logs, and more. Cocktail does all of these things and more. Unlike Onyx, Cocktail remembers your password for doing these maintenance operations so you don’t have to type it in every launch. Cocktail can also set some useful hidden preferences not in System Preferences. While it doesn’t have the sheer number of hidden preferences that MacPilot does, it does have many of the useful ones. A feature many non-Terminal users will enjoy is that Cocktail can force empty the Trash. For the true network geeks, there are a set of advanced options for, well, your network. In most places where hidden/advanced preferences are available is the option to set them back to the defaults, just in case you mess something up.

In the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìPilot?¢‚Ǩ¬ù tab are ways to run all maintenance tasks at once and schedule them to happen automatically. Scheduling is essential functionality for apps like Cocktail. Here’s where I wanted to see more options. The Scheduler only allows you to set the day of the week or every day for maintenance tasks. The Scheduler feature needs to have a little calendar to select specific days of the month; I could then schedule tasks for the end of every month. After scheduled tasks, you can chose to Restart, Shut Down, Sleep, Logout, or do nothing (quitting Cocktail is conspicuously missing). Also nice would be the option to automatically turn off the boot chime when scheduling a Restart. Yes, my Mac rebooting can wake me up. Cocktail features interfaces to Man (sounds a bit odd), and other UNIX commands. A really neat feature Cocktail has is the ability to save very detailed reports of your Mac as a plain text or XML file. Cocktail is the fastest and easiest app I’ve used to keep my Mac in tip-top shape. For $14.95, Cocktail is a great solution.

Retail Price: $14.95

Site: http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php

Snapz Pro X has finally gone Universal. Snapz Pro X is the premier video screen capturing application. It allows you to record what’s going on in any part of your screen. The new version is also Leopard compatible and includes a few bug fixes and some enhancements.

You can find out more about Snapz Pro X 2.1.0 at http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/.

Rating: 5/5

I happened across a nifty utility app for Intel Macs. As many folks have noted the MacBook Pro, in particular, runs a bit hot. My 17?¢‚Ǩ¬ù consistently got hot enough that I always made sure I had something to toss under it if I was planning to work with it sitting on my lap. Some folks also have some Intel Mini’s that run a bit hot as well.

No more! smcFanControl comes to our rescue. The only very minor downside I can find with it is that, because you are forcing it to run the fans at a faster RPM than the default setting Apple set, you will hear the fans more. If “absolute” quiet is your primary goal you’ll want to get external things like a CoolPad or something similar, at least for your laptop.

I have smcFanControl set low enough on my 17?¢‚Ǩ¬ù MacBook Pro that it hasn’t been too horrible. Playing music or movies at a regular volume I don’t hear the fans at all. I do hear them if I keep the volume really low (sleeping 5 year old not far away in those moments).

It’s a straightforward, easy install. Loads nicely in the menu bar with temp and fan rpm. It allows you to have it auto start after login as well as auto apply specific settings for battery, AC-power or when charging (laptops only). It doesn’t override the automatic mode that causes the fans to rev higher when CPU load increases enough to warrant even stronger cooling. I find that mine doesn’t need to rev nearly as often now though.

An earlier version had a memory leak that could ramp up the memory use if running for extended periods. The developer released an updated version that addressed that. I’ve seen no issues with it since I started using it about 2 weeks ago, so be sure you are downloading at least version 2.1

Quite a nice little app if you want to keep the heat down on your Intel Mac. Now, if I could just find something similar for a really toasty AlBook (PPC)!

Version Reviewed: 2.1

Retail Price: Free (Donationware)

Site: http://81.169.182.62/~eidac/software/smcfancontrol2/index.html

Rating: 3.5/5

General Info: ButtonDesign can save you time from, well, designing buttons for a webpage. A sidebar on the left provides button style choices. The problem with many of them is that they just don’t look good. The flag-looking one is a mess, reminding me of web-pages from the late 90’s. Some of them are pretty good though. There is a mix of buttons with around half of them being acceptable. For each button is a set of options for normal, hover, and pressed states. There are the usual text options like fonts, bold, italic, and underline as well as colors. More adjustable items include size, alignment, opening in a new window, and more. When you’re finished, you can export to CSS or HTML with either JPEG or PNG. Despite the number of ugly buttons I would recommend ButtonDesign for beginners and/or those with less graphic design skills.

Retail Price: $19.95

Site: http://www.ragesw.com/products/buttondesign.html

Apple has released a public beta of Safari 3. The biggest part of Safari 3 is that you can run it on a Windows XP or Vista computer.

?¢‚Ǩ?ìSafari is the fastest and easiest-to-use web browser for Mac and PC. Safari 3 Beta introduces new features to help you find your way and enjoy your time on the web.

Arrange your tabbed windows with just a drag and drop. Instantly and graphically locate any text on the current web page with the new find command.

Safari is also now available for Windows so you can continue to use your favorite browser even when you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re not using your Mac.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

The public beta is available for free download for mac or pc at http://apple.com/safari/.

iAppblog will have a full review of it in the near future.