app

Flipboard + Twitter Lists

In this video, I’m taking a look at a little known fact within a little known fact about the free media consumption app for the iPad, Flipboard:

1) You can add each of your Twitter Lists to Flipboard as a separate Sections and…

2) You can add people to your Twitter Lists that you don’t actually follow on Twitter

    This means that you can group together dozens of Twitter feeds in a single list that would otherwise bog down your Twitter stream and add the list to Flipboard and read them all in Flipboard’s magazine-style format. It also means that, since most website post links to their latest articles on Twitter, you can read any such website in Flipboard as if it had its own Section simply by giving it its own list in Twitter. This can also come in handy for people who post a lot of content to Twitter, but so much so that it floods your feed and makes it overwhelming—don’t follow them, add them to a list and make them a Section of Flipboard.

    No Flash? No problem—click here!»

    I don’t think I’ll be reading my main Twitter stream on Flipboard as much as I’ll be using it to consume these other sources of content—the ones I don’t actually follow.

    How do you use Flipboard? Found any cool tricks? Leave a comment and let me know!!

    Get it Together

    This week we have some odds and ends that will help you tie up loose ends.

    mu Get it TogethersterMachine

    This multi-purpose utility gives you a GUI to all kinds of OS X maintenance tasks including cleaning caches, running cron jobs and creating invisible files. This app comes in Panther and Jaguar flavors.

    mu Get it TogetherCocoazip

    Zip, gzip and tar files to your heart’s content. Oddly enough, Cocoazip doesn’t untar or unzip, but I suppose there are other utilities for that.

    mu Get it TogetherFirefoxy

    Firefoxywidgets Get it Together

    Love Mozilla Firefox, but not so much the windows-looking submit buttons and drop-downs? Swap your widgets for sleeker ones with Firefoxy (shown above).

    WebAddressBook

    Here’s a nice extra for those of you who’d like to access your addresses from the web. WebAddressBook uses PHP and MySQL to provide password-protected access to your contacts. This server based system easily imports group vCards exported from OS X’s Address Book.

    I think we found something for everybody in this mix. Until next week, have fun!

    Brian

    mu Get it TogetherDownloads provided by MacUpdate

    Back to Basics Mac Freeware

    Remember the good old days, when your Mac time was spent composing text documents and editing images? These days you can pass on the pricey image manipulation programs and expensive office suites.

    This week we’ll look at a couple of the coolest freeware apps I’ve seen lately and a third that will banish old unused apps without a trace.

    LiveQuartz

    livequartz Back to Basics Mac Freeware

    LiveQuartz is a fantastic image editing application. It supports layers and effects – which are rendered instantly. LiveQuartz also has powerful tools, including duplication, background eraser and gradient tools.

    LiveQuartz supports a number of file formats and its effects include sharpen, blur and color adjust. All these features make this the most powerful free native image editor for the Mac.

    Bean

    After years of word-processor mediocrity, Pages has raised the bar. But, for quick editing (and for free) you can enjoy the fast, smooth interface of Bean. This word processor includes grown-up features like word count, auto-save and style options.

    Bean imports and exports Word documents, stores natively in RTF and exports PDF. It also does tables and images. All this fun for 2 megabytes.

    AppTrap

    The previous to freebies should replace at least a few other apps on your Mac. But don’t just drag the app to the trash – at least until you’ve installed this preference pane. This system addition lives in System Preferences and kicks in when you trash an app.

    Once the app hits the trash can, AppTrap kindly offers to delete all the system files associated with the to-be-trashed program – making your Mac a cleaner place.

    Grab these two apps and clean house.

    Brian