Melinda & Cristiano

Yes, it’s time for Appdate #10, meaning that there are at least 10 cool applications out there for the Mac!

My pick for this Appdate is a simple little application that does something very powerful: it prevents your Mac from getting any sleep. The fitting name that was chosen for this application is Caffeine as it works like a shot of caffeine to your OSX. It measures only 48KB and it can be downloaded for free from here.

The idea behind Caffeine is that there are these moments that you want to prevent your Mac (including the screen) to go to sleep or standby. Some examples for why you would want to do these include reading a PDF on screen, or showing a YouTube movie to friends. In both cases you don’t want to go and touch the mouse every few minutes, and you neither want to go and mess with your power saving settings.

When installed, Caffeine gives you a little icon in your menu bar that can be clicked on to turn Caffeine on/off. It is the simplest app I ever used, but it does something so powerful that I can’t live without it anymore. Thanks to Melinda for pointing this little application out to me.

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Ever since I had a mac I had the following problem. When my mac is turned on for a long time, at a certain moment icons start missing. Sometimes icons in the Dock, sometimes in the Applications folder, sometimes both (yes, sometimes an app doesn’t have an icon in the Dock while it does in the Applications folder). It even affects Quicksilver, which then can’t start the application.

It is extremely random, sometimes can be solved by restarting, sometimes not. Sometimes it affects starting up applications, sometimes not. It is just the weirdest thing and I can’t figure out what causes it, and google is no help either. Anyone else had this before?

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When you are doing research these days, Wikipedia is more and more becoming a tool that can not be neglected. But one of the problems of Wikipedia is that there are too many topics with too many information. You can easily get lost in all this information and lose track of what you where trying to learn. I recently encountered a problem where I found a page, browsed on, and then couldn’t find that page back again. In comes Pathway.

Pathway is a special browser that allows you to browse Wikipedia articles (all languages), but here comes the trick: when you browse it creates a path of where you where. It links all the information and even helps you browse for new links easily. Best of all, it’s free!

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Ever had a bunch of MP3’s without proper name and tags? You could obviously buy your MP3’s on iTunes in the first place, but sometimes it is just handy to give those MP3’s the proper tags. In comes iEatBrainz (freeware) which doesn’t need any help from you or the filename to decide what song it is. To do this it calculates a audio fingerprint of the music and compares this to the data at MusicBrainz.org. Then it downloads the tags and it even updates iTunes for you. For me this is the best tool ever because I had some MP3’s that needed this tool badly.

Only one downside: some songs have appeared on so many albums that you have to make sure that the tool selected the right album. Maybe a new feature might to have the tool look on what songs you have and then decide what album they make up?

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Ever wondered how well your Mac performs in comparison to that new Mac Pro? Try using XBench. It is a simple app that benchmarks a variety of things and then provides you with a score. Although it does not provide a nice screen like FutureMark, it does provide you with all the statistics of every test it ran. My MacBook CD 1.8GHz with 2GB DDR2 benched a score of 44.73. What is your score? Download for free at www.xbench.com.

Update: After Martijn’s wooping score of 101.12 on his MacBook C2D I decided to try XBecnh again with all programs closed and on the power adapter. This time I managed to squeeze out a 83.81. Much better!

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