Toilet slippers are not optional.
If you’ve ever wanted to make your OS X menu bar black like the one on your iOS devices, this little utility will help you do that quickly and easily.
Wanna add the Finder to Launchpad? Probably not. But your mom might. So here’s how to add it to her Launchpad.
I guess somebody wants their house to smell like a barbershop.
Well, it depends. Do you have an SSD? If so, no, you don’t. You’re not going to benefit from defragging. Do you have a regular spinning disk drive? Then yes, you’ll probably benefit from defragging. Contrary to what most Mac zealots will tell you, OS X doesn’t do all the defragging you need on the fly. If you write and delete lots of big files (videos?), you’re going to have a lot of fragmentation. I ran iDefrag and immediately found my 2009 MacBook Pro to have serious amounts of fragmentation. And it made sense, I download and delete large video files everyday. This creates huge holes in the table on the disk and thus it makes it harder for the OS to find the files I need even when doing simple tasks. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it contributes to the MacBook running hotter when playing HD video as well. Probably hurts gaming performance as well.
So we’ve established you need to defrag. Is defragging going to help your two year old Mac that has put its HDD through the ringer with writing and deleting huge files? Well, it could…but you’d have to wait a very long time to defrag it. I ran iDefrag and let it run over night, and it only made its way through 3% of my drive. I don’t think it’s because iDefrag isn’t able to defrag quickly, but during the analysis iDefrag did on my drive it said my drive was over 90% fragmented. I eventually gave up on the idea of defragging the drive and came to the conclusion that backing up, formatting the drive and starting clean was my best option. At 90% fragmentation, it’s hopeless. Defragging would take days, it would be quite taxing on the drive, and after two years, I’d like to start fresh. My theory is, if you do periodical defrags on a freshly created OS X install, the defrags would go much faster and wouldn’t allow the drive to become as fragmented as mine did.
iDefrag has a few different modes of defragging. The more thorough the defrag process, the longer it takes. The biggest selling point that got me interested in iDefrag was its ability to defrag without a boot disk. Sadly, this isn’t currently possible under Lion. iDefrag works with Lion, but you’ll have to create a boot disk (which is easily created from within the app itself). Coriolis Systems, developer of iDefrag (as well as iPartition), have encountered a few problems due to Lion, and they said on their blog that they intend to issue fixes as soon as possible. These sorts of utilities are always going to have problems with major OS updates. Thankfully, you can still use iDefrag with Lion, you’ll just have to use a boot disk. You can download a demo here.
Helpful for getting Lion just the way you want with minimal effort on your part.
If you have multiple iTunes accounts (like I do), this is a huge time saver! Be forewarned, I had issues of high CPU usage. Check Activity Monitor after running the app!
A wonderful post about keeping your quick notes in Omnifocus and later processing them into other places instead of putting things into a notes app you might not check as regularly as a task manager.
A useful feature that might negate purchases of more expensive PDF software.
You’re going to ruffle feathers when you’re misusing others’ personal data.
I have been using Tweetbot’s mute feature to mute MacStories’ Chris Herbert from time to time and it works great.
I gotta wonder how many people will pay for the convenience of installing entirely off of a USB drive versus the convenience of procuring the OS in an hour over the Internet
I’m glad to see the 3DS get a shot in the arm sales-wise, but until the system gets a better software lineup, all the price cuts in the world aren’t going to help it.
We all need carbon fiber on our shoes, right?
iOS needs this too.
A look into the oppressive Japanese talent agency system.
Oh boy.
Stupid video.
I’d like one of these.
Lots of indie games for whatever you can pay.
Every Mass Effect fan will want one of these.
Old Ezio still looks like he can kick some Templar ass.
That’s a lot of extra cash.
Easily set up Jekyll blogs.
Carbon Fiber-looking iPad 2 cover
Remove the skeuomorphic looks of Address Book and iCal in Lion
Mass Effect 2′s Lair of the Shadow Broker, Arrival and Stolen Memory DLC is half-price this week! - Xbox Deal of the Week