Making the iPad practical

As an entertainment tool, iPad is excellent. But to get it to perform networking stuff, it failed miserably. It is not that the hardware sucked (in fact, the hardware is among the best in the market), it is just that Apple did not create the necessary software for it to do the tasks. This is where third party apps come in to fill the gap, and File Browser is one such useful app. It brings practical network and file access direct to your iPad for less than three bucks.

Installing and setting up FileBrowser

The installing of FileBrowser is the same as any other app. Just go to the AppStore and tap the “Install” button.

Setting it up is pretty easy too. While there are QuickGuide and Setup Documentation (both Mac and Windows versions, depending on the computer your connecting to), I have never read them and still able to get it connected. If I can do it, so can you too.

I installed the application and started right in. Click on “Menu -> Machines” button, and there’s the “+” button to start adding connections. Connecting to all of the other machines on my network was a snap, but remember that spelling counts here; if the name of the computer for the machine you’re connecting to isn’t exactly right, it won’t connect. This is the one place FileBrowser fails to live up to expectations for me… If you could browse network devices and just choose one, it would be a total lock, but adding machines could prove to be a bit annoying.

Streaming Video and Audio from Anywhere (On Your Network)

Once the machine name and login information is supplied, the connection is instantaneous, and this thing is fast! Now that you’re connected to another machine, you can browse the entire directory, including attached devices. You can copy to and from the other machines, or execute or stream files stored remotely.

Read that part again – you can execute or stream any file stored on any other device! That means you now have direct access from your iPad to the 250GB of BitTorrent movies you’ve been collecting for the last year. And we’re back to the iPad being… an entertainment device. You can also view, save and share photo collections quickly and easily, as showcased below.

Wrap-Up

Bottom line, this application has saved me more time and made my iPad use more enjoyable than any other software I’ve come across. It’s one of those essential utilities that you take for granted when you have it, but couldn’t live without. Do you have apps that are in a similar vein, or other ways of accessing your stuff from an iOS device? As always, let us know below!

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Software Downloads

The first and most important step to this process is to download the necessary software. You’re going to need two separate programs – Mac The Ripper and iSquint. Bascially, Mac The Ripper rips, or extracts, DVDs to your hard drive, and iSquint converts the video to be compatible with iOS devices. Mac The Ripper can be downloaded here and iSquint can be downloaded here.

Note: You can also use Handbrake to do rip your DVD into iOS compatible format. The only issue is that Handbrake does not support copy-protected DVDs while Mac The Ripper does.

Using Mac The Ripper

The first step is to insert the DVD of your choice into the Mac. Open Mac The Ripper. It will read and recognize the disc in your DVD drivet. Now you must click on the “Mode” option and change the “Full Disc Extraction” option to “Title Only Extraction”. Below these options, you want to make sure you have selected the title that is the longest and says “(MF)” or main feature. After you’ve completed this, you can return to the Disc tab and press GO!. In some cases, the program might prompt you to select a RCE Region. If it does, select RCE 1 and then click GO!. Finally, choose a location to save the file and let Mac The Ripper do its job. It will take some time.

Using iSquint

Once the DVD has been ripped, you can remove the movie and close Mac The Ripper altogether. Now open the file that was created, go into the “Video_TS” file, and drag the item into iSquint. Be sure that you have selected the “Optimize for iPod” option and have “H.264 Encoding” enabled. If you want to, you can select “Add to iTunes”. In my experience, this has given me a few problems, so you might want to avoid it. Personally, I disable it and just drag the file into iTunes manually when iSquint has finished. Choose the location for the movie to be saved in and click Start to begin the conversion process. Now all you have to do is wait until the file is converted into an iOS compatible video.

Wrap-Up

Finally, once iSquint finishes, open up iTunes and find the new video file. Click and drag it into your iTunes library and add it to your iOS device just like you would for any other video. Now that you’ve added the movie go ahead and quit iSquint and go enjoy it on-the-go with your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad!

Do you know any other ways to convert videos? Better, faster ways maybe? Give us all your comments below!

The post How to Get Your DVDs Onto Your iOS Devices appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Startup/Running Apps

One of the biggest things that can bog down someone’s machine without them even realizing is applications that run on startup.

The first thing to do is to make sure you’re not hogging system resources with unused applications. Open System Preferences (hit “Command + Space” and type “System Preferences”, then hit Enter) and go to Accounts. Choose your Login on the left, and on the right hit the Login Items tab at the top. Check the list of apps, and be honest with yourself about how much you use them. I always say, if I don’t use something once a day or more, then it doesn’t deserve to be in the startup list. If there is something on this list that you don’t use often, highlight it and click the minus sign at the bottom to remove it.

The next step is to look up in your Menu bar for things you don’t use. Again, be honest! If you haven’t clicked the icon in a week or so, you probably only need it running when you want to use it, rather than all the time. If there’s something up there that you don’t even know what it is, get rid of it! Quit the application! (You may even want to remove it completely, but we’ll get in to that later!)

The last step is to press Command + Space for the spotlight, but this time type in Activity Monitor and hit Enter. This will bring up a list all the processes currently running on your computer. Look for anything that you can identify and that you don’t use, and quit it.

Quitting the Dashboard

Don’t quit the Activity Monitor yet though! The last thing you want to check is the Dashboard. Even though its a built in part of OS X, it can be a serious memory hog. Dashboard runs with the Dock, but only once you start it up on purpose. The problem is that there is no way to quit it except by doing it manually. In your Activity Monitor, select Dock and hit Quit Process then Force Quit. This will restart your Dock, and shut your Dashboard off until you call it up again, possibly saving you a ton of memory if you’ve got a lot of Widgets running.

Viruses/Spamware

I know what you’re thinking… Mac’s don’t get viruses. Unfortunately, this is a myth. Macs can be infected as well, even though it is not easy for virus to get onboard.

To get rid of any viruses or spam/adware your Mac currently has, I suggest iAntiVirus. It’s free, and does everything you could need it to, with a simple, understandable interface. If you really want to lock down network security as well, try Little Snitch. It can be downloaded for free too, and will alert you to literally all network traffic into and out of your Mac, allowing you to Allow or Deny any one application or service.

Free up storage space

One thing people don’t realize is that having too little disk storage space left on your Mac’s hard drive can really bog down your computer’s performance. There are a multitude of reasons this can have negative effects on your Mac’s performance, but without getting too technical, the more space, the better.

The most obvious thing to recover the hard disk space is to uninstall those applications that you no longer use. Go to your Applications folder and drag those applications that you don’t use anymore to the trash (you might consider installing AppCleaner).

The next thing you can do, and this is a biggie, is offload music, movies, and photos to an external hard drive. These media files probably took up tens, or even hundreds of gigabytes. Offload them to an external drive and keep your external drive close to your Mac.

If you use iTunes, your Movies and Music are all in essentially the same location on your drive, and you can use Apple’s guide to move your collection. For many people, this will make a huge difference in their hard drive’s available space. To move your iPhoto library, follow Maclife’s tutorial. It’s super quick and easy, as Apple has realized people’s need to use external drives and designed the programs to cooperate with them.

Wrap-Up

So what do you all think? Know any other great ways to speed up a Mac? I know I didn’t hit everything, so let us know in the comments!

The post How to Speed Up Your Mac For Free! appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Getting Started

First, load the Photos app from your home screen by tapping the Photos icon. Once the app loads, you have a view similar to the one below. There is a list at the top, showing Photos, Albums, Events, Faces and Places. Select what photos you want in the slideshow by selecting on of these categories, and then one of the albums of photos. I chose a vacation I took during my last year of schooling.

Setting up your slideshow

Once you’ve chosen your album, it will pop up as usual to allow you to look through the photos. Here though, instead of touching a picture to begin looking through, tap on the Slideshow button on the top right part of the screen. See below for reference.

Hitting the Slideshow button will get everything started, popping the Slideshow Options window up in front of your photos. Choose the type of transition you want to use.

Adding Music

From the Slideshow options, tap on the Music option to add music to your slideshow. You’ve probably noticed the system-wide on/off switch that they’ve assigned for music, making it easy to turn the background music on or off. Selecting the music option though, will bring up an entirely new window, and it should look like this:

Like in most iOS apps that invoke music from your Library, you can sort by Songs, Artists, Albums, and more, allowing you to easily find the background music you’d like. Find it and touch it to use that song. If you’ve already created the perfect playlist for your slideshow, you can use that as well.

Start the Show!

Now, tap Start Slideshow at the bottom of the Options window to begin. You’ll notice that during the show, your pictures display full screen, like in the first photo below, but at any time you can feel free to flick through to proceed to the next/previous slide. During the show, feel free to turn the iPad and the slideshow will of course auto-rotate as you’d expect.

Wrap-Up

As you can see, while super simple, the iPad’s Photos app gives you a great way to share photos in person. Whether to music, or your own narration, sharing photos with friends and loved ones with your iPad can be a fun and stress-free experience, especially if you already know what you’re doing!

What other ways do you use to share photos? Are you big on Flickr? Or is there a better app for that? Let us know in the comments!

Image credit: Richard-G

The post How to Create Slideshows On The iPad appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Features

Nightstand Central basically does everything you could basically expect of an alarm clock app, and probably more. Its more obvious features include its big flip-style clock, and its very clear weather display. While I (and more specifically my dock) prefer landscape mode, it will operate in portrait orientation as well. If you have an iPad with cell/GPS it will use these to automatically locate you for your weather, but even if you don’t you can manually set it up. Once you do, the weather and clock are designed really well. Everything looks clean and neat, but we’ll talk more on that in a minute. The one weather feature that would be appreciated is maybe a 5 or 7 day forecast with highs and lows, but who knows what they may come up with in an update! In addition to time and weather, the app features an alarm clock, making it a real all in one nightstand app.

Design

Not only does Nightstand Central take care of everything above that you’d want it to, but it looks pretty good doing it as well. You an choose from a ton of backgrounds (and in the paid version you can use your own photos as well). All the background appear to have a decent resolution, making them look very nice, and blend well with the clock and simple text to look really nice next to your bed. As mentioned, you can display the app in portrait or landscape mode, landscape being displayed above and portrait below, both looking great. The best part about the design though is one, simple tweak. The brightness of the screen can be adjusted with a simple drag of your finger, up or down. This is great for being able to have it dim enough to let you sleep, but take a quick swipe up and see whatever info you’re looking for.

Paid Features

While Nightstand Central’s free version looks great and does quite a bit, some features are reserved for the paid upgrade, which can be had for $1.99 through in-app purchase. Music alarms, which can include podcasts, books, etc, a built in flashlight, wallpapers made from YOUR photos, ad removal, wallpaper cycling, and custom positioning and size of the flip clock are all features reserved for those paying for the app. While these features are nice, they certainly aren’t a requirement for most, hence the existence of this review, but if you are interested in any of those extras it may be worth looking in to. Below you can see the settings menu as well as the non-intrusive way to but the full app if you choose.

Wrap-Up

Nightstand Central is a great looking app with more features than you might expect. From weather to time, alarms to music, Nightstand Central can do most anything you’d want. While some of the apps more complicated features are reserved for the paid version, the most useful ones are available for free, and it works great all on its own. So what do you think? Will you be downloading this app, or do you use another? Also, are the paid features enough to get you to pay $1.99 for them, or will you (like me) be sticking with the free version? Let us know in the comments!

NIghtstand Central (iTunes link)

The post How To Turn Your iPad Into An Alarm Clock – For Free! appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

1. Sticky Notes – Free

First, download Sticky Notes Free from the App Store. It is FREE, as its name implies.

Load it up from the Home screen. Using Sticky Notes Free for iPad is pretty intuitive, particularly given its simple feature set. You’ll be greeted with a blank cork board to begin. Tap the plus sign icon in the top right hand corner to add your first sticky note. As you’d expect, a new sticky note will pop up.

Touch inside the note to edit it. During editing, you can touch the “i” info button in the note’s lower right hand corner to change the notes color and font size. Touch “Done” to finalize the sticky.

While Sticky Notes Free only comes with limited range of options, it is a great app for those who just want a simple no-frill sticky note app. It is super easy to use and costs nothing, which makes it even more attractive.

On the other hand, if you don’t mind paying a bit of money to get more functionalities, Sticky Notes with Bump is a great choice.

2. Sticky Notes with Bump – $0.99

While Sticky Notes with Bump may not be free, it is pretty close and its functionality is incredible for a simple sticky notes app. To give this app a shot, download it just like any other paid app from the app store and launch it from your home screen.

Once it opens, you’ll be greeted with a little Help popup, which for now you can ignore, because I’m walking you through everything. So just click outside the popup to close it.

You’re now greeted with a cork board, used and worn. Want a brand new one? Or something different altogether? Then I guess this a great place to get into the app’s features! In the lower left hand corner of the cork board is a flap. Swipe on it to lift it up. A dock will pop up at the bottom of your screen allowing you to change the background for your cork board. Many other stock options are available, but you can also use your own photos from the Photos app. Select your background and hit Done, and we’ll move on.

Next up are the app’s categories. Categories allow you to have several different cork boards, each of which have different sets of notes (ie. work, school, fun, etc.) and backgrounds to boot. To add or edit categories, just click the category bar to show your options.

Once you’ve edited your categories, its time to add a note. Click the plus sign in the top right corner and you’re greeted with the Add a Note popup. You can edit color, font, paper, text, and even a few other fun options like speech bubbles and calendars. Add a sticky and select what size you’d like to use, then add your note. Moving and organizing the notes is as easy as dragging and dropping them (You’ve probably noticed, or maybe even accidentally tapped, the lightning bolt next to the plus sign. This is a quick add, which is a standard yellow sticky).

Lastly, Stick Notes lets you share notes with others, as well as with yourself. To see what I mean, click the arrow in the top right corner. You’ll notice a menu come up with options to set your notes to your Lockscreen or Homescreen, attach it to an email, save it to your camera roll, or share notes via Bump. These options are great, as you’re able to better integrate your notes into the rest of your life. Bump in particular is cool, allowing you to sync your notes with your iPhone or iPod Touch that has Sticky Notes running.

Wrap-Up

So there you have it! Two options for stickies on your iOS devices! While Sticky Notes with Bump has a ton of features, it also costs money. Sticky Notes Free may be exactly that – free, but it does lack some features. So which side do you fall on? Would you rather use a free app with less features, or pay $0.99 for the ability to do a little more? Tell us in the comments!

The post 2 Useful Sticky Notes Apps To Get Things Done In iPad appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Creating a Playlist

Playlist creation is actually incredibly simple, although it does hide a little, at least until you know where to look. Head to your home screen and open up iPod. Now, just as in iTunes on your Mac or PC, in the lower left hand corner you should see a plus sign. This is the button used to create a new playlist, and it looks like this:

A simple click will give you the following screen, allowing you to name your brand new playlist. Enter your name and click the save button to add songs, and we’ll be off and running!

Adding Music

Now that we’ve created the actual playlist itself, its time to add the music! To do this, your mobile iTunes brings up a list of songs. If you don’t have much music, sorting by song like iTunes does by default might be fine, but if you’re like me, you’ve got a ton. In this case, just use the filters at the bottom of the screen to sort your music. For example, the first window below is my iPad sorted by default, then by artist. This make is much easier to find what you’re looking for. Once you do, simply click the plus sign to the right of each song you want to add to your new playlist!

Editing Your Playlist

Once you’ve added all the songs you want, tap “Done” in the top right corner to tell iTunes you’re ready to actually use your playlist. iTunes first though will take you to a screen where you can edit the playlist you’ve just created. As you can see below, you can delete the songs by clicking the red minus sign on the left side of each song. In addition, if you look to the right side of the screen, you will see three horizontal lines, tap and drag these markings to change the order of the songs. You can also click “Add Songs” in the top right corner, or “Done” when you’re finished.

Play it already!

Once you’re all finished and have clicked done, you’ll be greeted with the window below, your actual playlist. Tap on a song to start playing your new list, or click the “Edit” button in the top right corner to add or delete songs, or just change their order. You can even do things like add more than one instance of the same song for new ones you always want to hear twice!

Wrap-Up

Apple’s been making waves in mobile music since the advent of its iPod, and hasn’t skimped on the iPod app for iOS devices that do more than music. As a capable player, I use it practically everyday at some point, but its definitely not my only mobile music solution, let alone my only music player in general! What do you use, and what could make the iPad’s iPod app better? Tell us in the comments!

The post How To Create and Edit Playlists Straight from your iPad appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Displaying Duplicates

The first way to clean duplicates out of your library is to have iTunes show you what duplicates actually exist in your library. To do this, open up iTunes and make sure you’re in your library screen. Then simply click File, and then Display Duplicates. This will change your library window into a duplicates window, showing you every music file you’ve got loaded into iTunes of which there is another with the same name.

You can now look through and find what you want to keep, or delete, and do so. This method is great for smaller libraries, or if you’re just trying to see how many duplicate files, and associated wasted space (as you can see displayed at the bottom of the screen) your library has. Where this becomes difficult though, are instances where repeats are okay, for instance, an actual studio album versus a live record. The songs in common between these CD’s may have the same name, but are very different songs. What do we do? Just keep reading to find out!

Displaying Exact Duplicates

If you have remixes or live tracks that share song names with albums, this is the method for you. Just like in the last method, we’re looking to the File menu for help. This time though, after click file, hold the Alt, or Option key, and you’ll notice that where it used to say Display Duplicates, it will now read Display Exact Duplicates. Clicking this will display, rather than songs whose names match, songs who are literally exact matches. This avoids seeing those same-title, different-track duplicates in your list, and can drastically change your results. Compare mine below to those above to see what I mean.

Which should I try?

Well, the differences are clear. You’re going to get way more results with the former, more broad search, and much more specific results with the latter. Which you want to use depends mostly on what your goal is. Is your hard drive full, and you’re looking to get rid of, or just move, a bunch of music that you only listen to occasionally, lie those live albums? Or, like many, have you copied and moved and recopied your library a bunch of times, with the best of intentions, but mixed results, and you need to clean up copies of files that shouldn’t be there? In that case, you’ll need the latter, more specific duplicate search.

What other ways have you found to keep your library clean? Do you use a third party utility, or just let iTunes handle it all? Let us know in the comments!

The post How to Delete Duplicates in iTunes (And Not Just By Name!) appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

That was in the past. After numerous updates, it has improved by leaps and bounds and has replaced many sources of news outlets for its users, and went as far as to win Apple’s iPad App of the Year for 2010. Read on to see how it gives your news and more importantly, why people are loving it.

What’s Flipboard all about?

The best part of Flipboard is that it is everything you care about, laid out beautifully. When you create your Flipboard account, you basically add news feeds for it to pull in. You can also bring in social networking feeds, like Facebook and Twitter, as well as your entire Google Reader feed, and read it all like a magazine.

Design

Flipboard is designed to make you feel like you’re flipping through a magazine. When Flipboard starts, you’ll be greeted with an image from one of your feeds, giving you a quick glimpse into what may be in your news at that moment. For example, the Golden Gate Bridge was featured in mine, shown below. There is also is a “FLIP” button that hints you to “flip” open your magazine.

After you’ve set up your content, you’ll see them all laid nicely in the boxes.

Now simply choose a box to start checking out content! As soon as you touch a certain media source, it flips open just like a magazine, using headings from pages as headlines, and even separating content or posts out into separate ”articles” that you can click on to read more.

Flipboard will never leave you wondering where to go to find more to read or look at. Every time you get done reading, or if you don’t happen to find something you like, you can just turn to the next page of content, like in any book or magazine, and continue reading. You can also drag along dots at the bottom of the screen to go to a specific page. All this content is automatically populated, so you’re not doing much waiting at all while content loads.

Functionality

As mentioned above, Flipboard pulls in content from tons of sources. On top of that, you can easily share and interact with the content as well. For instance, once you have added your Facebook account, you can comment on photos and reply to wall posts, as well as view links in an integrated window. You can even “Like” the content! In Twitter, you can tweet and share links just like in any other Twitter app, except that it looks gorgeous in Flipboard!

RSS Feeds in Flipboard

Importing RSS feeds is as easy as you are probably expecting it to be. Tap the “Add a Section” box. It will bring up a window which allows you to add content from anywhere across the web, including RSS feeds. Select “Add a Custom Section“. This will allow you to bring in feeds from anywhere across the net, as long as they have an associated Twitter account.

Once you add a feed, it will look like this:

With headlines at the top reminding you what site’s news you’re reading, as well as smaller headings for each article, navigating a feed is as natural as looking through a magazine for an article you want to read. (Maybe even more so given Flipboard lack of ads!)

Social Networking

One of the App’s most highly touted features is its integration with Facebook and Twitter. Adding Facebook and Twitter accounts is super easy. Same as the steps above, just select Facebook or Twitter from the list and enter your account credentials. Flipboard will then pull in Facebook News Feed items as well as Tweets, and organize them in an easy to consume fashion.

As you can see, not only is Facebook displayed nicely with photos, groups, and basically all of Facebook’s basic functionality, but Twitter’s links are displayed perfectly, as well as tweets, retweets, and all.

Using Google Reader in Flipboard

Not only is setting up Google Reader a breeze in Flipboard, but its also what I believe (so far anyway) the absolute best way to read news you care about on the iPad. As you can see in the screenshot below, Google Reader in Flipboard offers every bit of functionality the actual reader does. You can see Starred Items (as well as star ones you enjoy originally on your iPad) and check out your subscriptions, followers, and more. You can also share Google Reader articles with others with just a couple of touches.

To top things off, Google Reader just looks perfect in Flipboard. It honestly feels like the magazine someone created just for you. From your own selected content to the natural, magazine like feel of flipping through Flipboard’s pages of content, no one has congregated data and information in such a user-friendly way to date. Google Reader is the perfect fit on the iPad, just check out the screenshot below to see how well its organized.

Wrap-Up

This is practically just scraping the surface of the possibilities Flipboard offers. With tons free content that you already get from multiple different sources available in a unified, elegant interface, there isn’t much standing between Flipboard and the mainstream. I can’t recommend it highly enough, and definitely suggest you give it a shot as well.

What other readers and content integration tools have you found? Are you going to try Flipboard? Let us know what you think of it in the comments!

Flipboad (iTunes link)

The post Flipboard: A Must-have Social Magazine App For iPad appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Getting FaceTime for Mac

This part’s easy! Just head over to http://www.apple.com/mac/facetime/ and hit the “Download the Beta” button. The download is almost 150MB, so set aside a few minutes (or hours if you have a slower connection), but the software is free, so no complaining! This though brings me to my next point, this software is in beta. I’ve been using it for over a month now and haven’t run into any serious bugs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t. You just have to keep in mind that you are using a beta product. Also be aware that FaceTime for Mac requires OS X Snow Leopard, so don’t even try installing without it, because it won’t work. Once the download is complete and the software is installed, launch FaceTime and we’re off to the races!

Creating Your FaceTime Account

The first time you launch FaceTime, you’ll be asked to create a FaceTime account. This basically just means setting up an account associated with whatever your most frequently used email address is. This way, when people try to add you, they won’t have a difficult time. You’ll assign a password to your account, or use your iTunes account information (or Apple ID) and FaceTime will import its contact list from your Mac’s Address Book.

Using FaceTime

The first thing you likely want to do is add the contact you think you’ll FaceTime most frequently to your Favorites list. This is accomplished by simply clicking the “+” sign in the top right corner of the below window, and then clicking their name.

Now that you’ve got a few contacts added to your Favorites, simply clicking one will call them. You can tell if someone is available for FaceTime by the camera indicator next to their name. The question mark means they may or may not be available, but the blank camera means they are. Click a name, and a FaceTime call is started! This means you can call people with Mac’s or iPod’s by having their FaceTime account-associated email in your contacts, or call them on their iPhone by having their mobile phone number in your book.  Pretty handy if you know a lot of people with FaceTime!

Once you’re in a call, the default view looks like this:

Just like in Skype, your picture is minimized to the bottom of the window, and your friend is the main window, making it very natural to focus on the person you’re talking to! Also take note of the menu at the top. Under Video you’ll find a few interesting perks. First is the Enter Full Screen option, giving you a much more focused, even theatre-like, experience.

This menu also offers options for switching to Landscape mode, using different microphones than that which is set to default, and muting your FaceTime call so they can’t hear what you’re saying, just like on a normal telephone or cell phone.

Wrap-Up

Actually using FaceTime for Mac is as simple as most other operations are on a Mac. The layout is simple, clean, and beautiful, and it works quite well. The downsides? In my opinion, the biggest would be that the uninitiated user would see no extremely obvious place that the contacts come from, nor would they see an obvious way to start a call with a contact. If Apple can keep the layout simple, as well as expand the user base, FaceTime for both Mac’s and all other Apple products could become a popular form of communication. Until then though, it will likely continue to be something that enthusiasts are in to more than anyone.

What do you think of FaceTime? Do you wish it were more like Skype? Where is Skype with a cross-platform (including mobiles) app anyway? Tell us what you think in the comments!

The post How to Use FaceTime For Mac to Chat with Friends & Family appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Design and Ordering Process

Ordering on Zazzle is a super easy process. For this review, I’ll do a quick walkthrough of the iPad case ordering process, although its very similar with all their products. (I’ve gotten business cards from them and its almost exactly the same, and have designed t-shirts with them, which is also basically identical in most aspects.)

First, head over to www.zazzle.com/custom/ipadcases. Here you’ll be greeted with some examples of what can be done when users are left to customize their own cases, as well as some information on the process. Click the “Create a case” button toward the right to get started.

Once you click through to Zazzle’s iPad case design page, you’ll be greeted with a “Getting Started” window. This window will allow you to start by inserting the picture of your choice, or text of your choice, onto the case. You can always add more later, and once you have a few items on there, you can adjust their size, orientation, placement and more with the intuitive controls provided on the site.

Keep in mind that in the case of images, you want to use as high a resolution as possible, that way if you decide to expand them a little during your design process you won’t have a problem with their appearance. If you do expand an image to the point where it may not look good in the final printing of the product, you’ll get little exclamations letting you know you may want to switch to a higher resolution image, or reduce the zoom of the image in your current design. The image below is an example of a design with a stretched out low-res image. See the exclamations?

Once you’re happy with the appearance of the case, just click the “Add to cart” button and follow through the standard checkout procedure. Shipping times vary depending on how much you spend, but I bought economy and it took about a week to arrive.  Not bad at all considering it’s custom made!

The Final Product

As for the final version of my iPad case, well, for the moment I couldn’t be happier. It’s very rigid, offering great protection against bending, and it barely adds any bulk to the iPad. In fact, I found it actually made gripping the iPad significantly easier, making reading and playing games significantly more enjoyable than before. It also does a great job of protecting against those little dents the aluminum backs of iPads tend to get over time.

One of the reasons though that the grip is so good is the material they use to make the custom designs. I’m not sure if it is some type of plastic or not, but it sure feels like fabric. This gives it a great grip, but also has lead to some concern for me. While I’m not seeing any problems yet (I’ve only been using it for a few days) I am concerned that if this is truly a fabric, as it feels to be, that anything white may tend to get dirty over time.  I’m hoping this is not the case, and will certainly be keeping you all informed as time goes on, but for now, its a perfect white, the graphics look fantastic, and the case protects as advertised!

Have any of you ever made a custom case? What cases are you using now, if you’re using one  at all?  Is this something you’d be interested in? As always, let us know in the comments!

The post Zazzle Custom iPad Case Review appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Installation

On most Macs, you either got Safari 5 with your computer, or your Mac updated it automatically for you. If it hasn’t though, or you’re on a Windows machine, just head over to www.apple.com/safari and use Apple’s standard download form to download the installer for Safari 5. Once you have downloaded and installed the browser, open up Safari.

Using Safari Reader

Once Safari opens up, open up your favorite news site, MakeTechEasier.com for example. Initially on most news sites, on the right side of Safari’s address bar at the top, you’ll see an RSS Button. Click this button and you’ll be shown the RSS feed for that news site. RSS allows you to do things like subscribe to your favorite blogs. Safari 5 takes the concept of RSS  step further though, by appealing its own formatting to make blog posts and news articles far more appealing to the eye.

Since you’re on Make Tech Easier, click an article you’re interested in. Once the page loads, in the address bar on the right side, that same RSS button should be gone, and in its place should be a Reader button, which should look like this:

Click the reader button, and up from the bottom of your Safari window will slide a simple, elegant reading layout of the article your currently have open, and everything else on the page will be shaded black, allowing you to more easily focus on what you’re reading.

I chose to look over my MakeTechEasier article from last week on installing and using iOS 4.2 on your iPad. With a great looking font, easily viewed pictures, and no distracting background, Safari Reader made looking over my post easier and more pleasant than usual.

Tips!

Now that you’ve got the Reader up, here a few tips to help you in using it:

• To change the font size of your Reader article, you can either use the magnifying glass at the bottom of the reader window, or on your Mac hit “Command and +/-” sign. You can also click “View” in the Menu bar, then Zoom In or Zoom Out.
• The control bar at the bottom of the Reader window does not house only magnification controls, but also sharing and printing controls. With one click you can email the article to someone, or print it out for later reference.

Wrap-Up

Safari’s Reader feature may not be something that you would use everyday, but its certainly something that can come in handy under certain circumstances, like prolonged reading on the computer, or a particularly long article. Is this something you use? Will you now? Or do you use an entirely different RSS reader? Let us know in the comments, especially if you know of something better!

The post How to Read Articles More Comfortably in Safari With Safari Reader appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Download and Installation

First, a quick disclaimer:  Remember, you should always be backing up your iPad, as any software update can theoretically take a toll on your device if something went wrong.  This is a fully stable release though, so everything should be quick and easy, but always better safe than sorry!

To download and install iOS 4.2, you’ll need two things. First is the newest iTunes, which you can get at Apple.com/itunes/download. Once you install this new iTunes version, things only get easier.  Its a standard install, so we won’t waste too much time with that, but now that you’ve got your new iTunes version installed, plug in your iPad and open iTunes!

Once your new iTunes is installed and open, click your iPad in the left sidebar. Run a sync to backup your iPad. Once it is finished, click the Check for Update button and follow the prompts to download and install the update.  Now let iTunes finish, and your iPad will restart. Once it does, it’s ready to roar!

Using iOS 4.2 for iPad

So you’ve got it installed, but how do you take advantage of its new feature set?

First, let’s go over the two biggest changes. Most of these changes are no news to iPhone users. First, multitasking. This has been a big issue in previous iteration of the iOS. It is good that is now finally remedied. Apple solved the problem of multitasking in a simple, but useful way. Prior to iOS 4.2 on iPad, when you clicked the Home button, you would be taken to your home screen and your app would close. Now, as long as the app has been developed to have multitasking support, the app freezes and goes into the background. Additionally, if approved by Apple (which most seem to be), they can continue to do things like play music in the background, i.e. Pandora and Last.fm.

The second big feature brought by iOS 4.2 is the ability to add folders to your home screen. Now, instead of having a home screen full of game apps, you can just have one folder for all of your games, making home screens far more easy to navigate. For instance, I went from having 6 home screens plus the search to 2 home screens, making my apps far easier to find.

Using Multitasking

To use multitasking, just press your iPad’s Home button. The app will drop into the background. Now, to bring up recent and open apps, just double click the Home button. The bottom of your screen will rise up to reveal a dock of app icons. Pick one, and boom, up comes your app!

The problem can come in though, when an app freezes, as does happen occasionally. Previously, you could just hit the home button to close the app, then open it back up to reset it. Now though, if the app has multitasking enabled, it may not close when you hit Home. To truly close an app, there is an easy trick.  Just go to your Home screen and double click the Home button to bring up your current and recent apps. Then, hold one of them as if you were going to move it. Once they start jiggling, lift your finger, and you’ll notice that there are small minus signs in the top corners of each app. Click the minus to Quit the application. Now you can restart it completely, whenever you’d like to.

Using Folders

Folders can be super convenient, and are incredibly easy to use. To create a folder for your games, for example, hold your finger on a game app’s icon, then let go when the app starts jiggling. Drag the app over top of another game and let it go. The iPad will automatically group them into a folder, and even try to name the folder based on what type of apps they are. Feel free to rename it if you like, but generally it is actually a pretty good guesser. You’ve now got a games folder that you can add your other games to, and move it to organize your Home screen, just like any other app icon.

Wrap-Up

iOS 4.2 is a much needed, and incredibly complete update. With multitasking, folders, and some speed improvement, your iPad is now more of a computer than ever. What do you think of the update? What’s missing from it?  Let us know in the comments!

Image credit: Ben Atkin

The post How to install iOS 4.2 on The iPad and Use It to The Fullest appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Getting Started

XMenu has some great options, and most importantly they’re really easy to configure.

To start, go get XMenu. It’s free, and you can download it here (Be sure to check out the rest of their free software while you’re there. They make some useful apps!).

Once you run through the standard OS X installation process, you can start XMenu up. Head to the top right corner of your screen. Notice a blank space between your Spotlight magnifying glass and your clock? That’s where your icons will go, and by default is an Applications menu.

(You can right click the space, or wait for the icon to pop up.) Once you see it, right click it (or control click it) and hit “Preferences“.

Options and Features

The Preferences window will let you do any configuration you’re looking to do. From changing what menu options are showing to changing how and where they appear in the menu bar, you can customize a ton of the menu options.

To start, let’s talk about the menus that are available. The most clear options are those that are self-explanatory – Applications, Developer, Home, and Documents. These, as you might expect, display those folders most commonly used in Mac OS. You can also very clearly and easily adjust the way the lists display, changing font sizes and icons. You can also change how the icons in the actual menu bar display, and change whether or not you want their text to show as well.

The two more confusing, but also more useful options in XMenu are the “User-Defined” folder and the “Snippets” folder. These are folders that you can now easily find by opening OS X’s Finder and drilling down to “Library->Application Support“, then either XMenu or XSnippets, depending on which you want to edit.

To add a folder or item to XMenu is to add it to your User-Defined menu, so that when you click that menu you will see everything you put in this folder. For example, I put my Downloads folder there, so I can now access it in my Menu Bar or Dock, whichever is most convenient at a given moment.  

In the XSnippets folder you want things that you use often, for example, company logos, pieces of text, URL’s, basically anything. Once you have them here, you can access them super easily by just clicking them in your Snippets menu. For instance, if you’ve got an image there that you use all the time, you can just be in your Word Document (or whatever program) and click the image in your Snippets menu, and it will be inserted right in where your cursor is!

Know any other apps that do something similar in a lightweight way?  What about other menu bar or dock customizations?  Let us know in the comments!

The post How To Customize Your Mac’s Menu Bar Using XMenu appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

What do I need?

• First, be sure to have at least 8GB of free hard drive space on your Mac. Most Mac comes with pretty big hard drives, so this probably won’t be an issue; but if it is, clear the space before you start.
• Additionally, you’ll need internet access – wired or wireless. 
• You’ll also need the Ubuntu ISO (or disk image) for your Mac, which you can get here
• VirtualBox by Sun, which you can get here!
• Lastly, this process might take up to about an hour, so have a little free time handy to devote to the process!

Walkthrough

First, once you’ve finished downloading VirtualBox and Ubuntu from the links above, run VirtualBox. Once it opens, you’ll want to create a new virtual machine. To do this, click “New” in the top left corner.

The first thing you’ll need to do now is name your virtual machine (VM) then select Linux as the Operating System and Ubuntu as the version. Give it a good name to remember and that distinguishes it from other operating systems, as if you ever install another VM you’ll want it to be clear which one is which.

Now, select the amount of RAM you want to dedicate to your VM. Even though Ubuntu doesn’t need a ton, I still recommend you to dedicate at least 1GB of RAM, or 1024MB.

On the next screen, make sure that “Boot Hard Disk” is checked, and “Create new hard disk” is selected.  Then click “Continue”.

Next will come the wizard you’ll use to create the virtual hard disk onto which you’ll install and run Ubuntu. Choose Continue to begin, then select “Dynamically expanding storage” and click Continue. Here you’ll need to select how much hard drive space you want to dedicate to Ubuntu. This will come from your Mac’s primary hard drive’s space, so decide how much you want to give up (I used 5GB) and input that number, then click the Continue button, then Done.

Now we just need to tell the Ubuntu virtual machine to read from the Ubuntu ISO for the installation process, and thankfully, VirtualBox will help us to do this. Run the Ubuntu VM by double clicking on it on the left side of the VirtualBox screen. Now you’ll see the First Run Wizard, which let’s us install Ubuntu on the virtual drive we just created. Click continue to begin the setup process. On the “Select Installation Media” screen, click the folder icon on the right side.

In the window that comes up, select Add in the top left corner:

Now navigate to wherever you downloaded the Ubuntu ISO image to and select the ISO file. You’ll then see Ubuntu in your Media Manager window.

Select it and press the Select button.  You’ll then see Ubuntu as your selected installation media, and can click Next.

After clicking Next, click done, and you’ve finished the hardest parts!

Now comes installing Ubuntu! This will take about a half an hour. Once the installer loads, you’ll be greeted with this screen giving you the option to either install or try Ubuntu:

Pick your language, then click Install. At the next screen click “Download updates while installing” and “Install this third-party software“. This will ensure that when you’re finished your install, Ubuntu is up to date and ready to go, as well as ready to browse the internet to its fullest ability.

While the installation begins, you’ll be greeted with some options screens, like time zones, etc.  Just select whatever is appropriate for you and click Forward, proceeding through the process.

It will also ask you, during installation for efficiency, to set up your User Account. You’ll also name your computer here, so if you plan on networking, pick something that’s easily remembered and identified.

Once you get to the Guide slideshow, the bulk of the installation will be happening. This will take 20-30 minutes or so depending on computer speed and available resources. Scroll through the slideshow to see some cool stuff you can do with Ubuntu and how you can work it into your computing process.

Once installation finished and you restart the VM, which Ubuntu will prompt you to do, you’re all finished, and will be greeted with your new Ubuntu desktop after login!

Now just explore and enjoy! Mac users out there, what do you think of Ubuntu 10.10?

The post How to Install Ubuntu Maverick On Your Mac Virtualbox appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Next, open up GarageBand and the Finder window. In GarageBand, you want to be creating a new song, so if it doesn’t by default, just go to “File -> New“, then New Project on the left and Loops on the right. Lastly, click Choose in the lower right corner.

In the new popup window, click “Create“.

Now switch over to your Finder window. Here, you’ll want to browse to the file you want to turn into a ringtone. Once you find it, simply drag it into GarageBand, and drop it into the Loops area in the center of your screen.

Once GarageBand has imported the track, we’re halfway there!

1. First, make sure the song is position correctly by clicking and dragging the track as far to the left as possible.

2. Now that we’ve done that, we want to trim the song down. Generally you want to use somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds so that the file size is easily used and manipulated. To trim your song down, just press the space bar to start listening to your track. When you find the part of the track you want to use as a ringtone, remember where it lies along the timeline at the top of the track. These marking make it easy to remember the section of song you want. 

3. Once you’ve decided, click at the beginning of the part you want to keep as your ringtone and click “Edit -> Split“. Now the song you imported will be split into two pieces. Delete the beginning piece that you don’t want. Now do the same for the part of the track that falls after where you want the song to end, and drag the remaining piece (which should be the part of the track or song you want to use as a ringtone) all the way to the left.

4. Now that you’ve got your ringtone ready, the last step is getting it onto your phone. To do this, first drag the scroll bar in GarageBand as far right as it can go and look for a little arrow in the timeline at the top of the window. This arrow signifies the end of your song, and you will just need to drag it to the left to where you want your ringtone to end, so that you don’t have a bunch of silence.

Now, we just need to save the ringtone to get it on your phone! This varies with phone type, but here are the most common ways to do it:

• If you have an iPhone, you may know that you can add ringtones from iTunes. This is super simple: in GarageBand’s Share Menu, just hit “Send Song to iTunes“, then add the ringtone to your iPhone through iTunes like you would for any other ringtone.
• If you have another smartphone, like an Android phone, just hit that same Share Menu, but then click Export Song to Disk. Then save the track as an MP3 and put it on your smartphone, and set it as a ringtone from there.
• If you don’t have a smartphone, sometimes the best way to get the ringtone to your phone is to send it as an MMS over email. To do this, create a new email in whatever email app or website you use, and address the email to your cell phone number. This address can vary depending on your carrier, but a quick Google search can give you what address you’ll need to use. The ringtone will come into your phone as an MMS, and you can usually save the audio from the MMS as a ringtone.

Do you have any questions or know  of another way to create your own ringtones on a Mac?  Let us know in the comments!

The post How To: Make Your Own Ringtones in GarageBand in Mac OS X appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Green screen (also known as Chroma key) is a commonly used technique for compositing two images or frames together in which a color (in this case, the green background) from one image is removed (or made transparent), revealing another image behind it. In Apple’s iMovie, this feature is readily available for your usage.

Why iMovie?

The main reason for using iMovie is because every new Mac has it, which makes it essentially free (save for a few cents for poster board, but we’ll get into that later) for all Mac users. Secondly, iMovie is easy to use and is effective for producing top-notch videos.

Keep in mind though, the green screening feature is only available in iMovie ’09. ’08 won’t do the trick. If you don’t have the newest version of iLife, don’t bother trying. All new Mac’s come with this though, so if you aren’t sure, open your version of iMovie and go to iMovie -> About in the menu bar to see which version you’re using.

Enabling Green Screening in iMovie

When I first started using the green screen function in iMovie, I was super confused because as much as I looked, and as confident I was that I was doing everything right, I couldn’t find green screen in the menu! There’s a simple solution to this problem, and I’m going to save you a ton of time here by cluing you in. Before doing anything, go to iMovie -> Preferences, and place a check beside “Show Advanced Tools“. This will make the cool options like green screening, picture-in-picture, and cutaways available. While they are labeled as advanced tools, they’re really easy to use. I’ll show you!

Steps to Creating Your Video

Now that you’ve enabled green screening, the first thing you need to do is decide on what background you want to use for your video. This can be a video or a still image, depending on what the purpose of your video is. 

Next, open iMovie, create a new Project, and drag it into the Project section at the top left corner of the screen. To adjust the length of the background to match the movie you want on the background, click the gear in the lower left-hand corner of the clip and select Clip Adjustments, then change the time appropriately.

Now you’ll need to film yourself to add on to the background. First, you’ll need a green screen. This is much easier than you may think. While you can go all out and either buy a fabric green screen or paint a wall green, you can also create one for almost nothing out of green poster board. Just scotch tape it onto a wall, and bingo, you’ve got a perfect, wrinkle-free green screen. Now, capture video of yourself doing whatever it is you want right into iMovie, by clicking the camera button on the left side.

Once you’ve recorded your clip, drag it up onto the background, and when you release the mouse button and the menu comes up, click Green Screen. Your recording will now be superimposed onto your selected background!

Lighting

Sometimes lighting can be tricky, but when working with lighting, remember these keys: you want the lighting even, and you want it bright. Unless you’re doing this for professional reasons, you can basically use any generic lamps you’ve got lying around the house. iMovie happens to be pretty great implementing green screen tech, and the Mac’s built in iSight is generally pretty capable, so you shouldn’t have too many issues. This is a generally accepted way to light a subject when recording for green screen:

If you do run into any shadowing problems, one trick I’ve learned that can work is to put a light behind the screen. This will help to bring some of the shadowing down in intensity, if it exists at all.

Wrap-Up

I told you it wasn’t too complicated! Have any questions? Let me know below and I’ll do my best to answer them. What do you plan on using the green screen technique for? Any tricks or tips for other users for those who have done it before?

The post How to Create And Edit Movies Using A Green Screen in iMovie’09 appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Where do I start?

The first steps in purging unnecessary files from your drive is finding out what you have that you can get rid of! First, check in your “Users/YourUserNameHere/Documents” and “Users/YourUserName/Downloads” (Particularly that Downloads folder) for files you don’t need, or downloads that you don’t use anymore. For instance, if you download applications from the internet and install them, but never clear this folder out, in all likelihood, this folder is chock full of disk image files for those applications. If you have no more use for these installers, you can safely deleted them to get back those precious megabytes.

That’s great, but what about applications or other files?

Another way to find big (and useless) files is by using Omni Disk Sweeper to point out the huge files that are taking up your disk space. Download and run OmniDiskSweeper and you’ll be met with this screen:

Select your main hard drive, in my case, “Macintosh HD” and double click it. You’ll be greeted with something similar to the following, although your files of course will be different:

You can now start analyzing which folders are the biggest and why, as well as what apps you may have installed that you no longer use. Before deleting those apps though, you probably want to install AppTrap. AppTrap monitors your Trash bin and when you delete an application, alerts you to associated files that wouldn’t otherwise have been deleted when the application was removed, and let’s you quickly and easily remove those files.

What about system files?

OS X (and other Unix based operating systems) come with maintenance scripts pre-installed. These scripts are used to clean up system logs and temporary files that your Mac created without you even knowing it. By default, maintenance scripts are set to run automatically so that you don’t need to do anything to benefit from them. The problem though, is that they’re set to run between 3:15 am and 5:30 am, and if your Mac is asleep or shut down during this period, it never gets done. The easiest way to fix this problem is an application called Yasu. Yasu is a graphical interface for your Mac’s maintenance scripts, allowing you to run them, and even choose certain ones to run or not run, whenever you want.

Don’t forget about languages!

Another set of files you won’t find grouped together, but that might take up a ton of room on your drive, are language files. When you install OS X and select easy install, or have the default install when you bought the computer, there are a huge amount of language files installed for languages you likely don’t speak, and probably won’t ever run into on the internet. Additionally, every time you install an application, it comes with its own set of (probably useless for you) language packages. These take up a ton of space on your hard drive.

Monolingual is a super simple application that allows you to simply select what languages you want to get rid of (and it defaults to keeping the most common ones, so you’ll probably be ready to go as soon as you open the app) and then deletes all of them for you. All you need to do is double check the languages (for instance, I kept all the versions of English, not just the most common one,) hit “Remove”, follow by “Okay”, and Monolingual will do all the work for you. After just a few minutes, Monolingual got me back nearly 200MB of room!

Last steps – don’t forget the trash

You may have cleared up some room already, but don’t forget the final, and most important, step - empty the trash! This will actually delete most of the files from your drive, and with the help of AppTrap, you’ll get every last file out of your system.

Do you know any other programs to help with the cleanup process? Or any other tips or tricks to keep your hard drive running smoothly? If so, let us know in the comments!

Image credit: Toronja Azul

The post How To Clean Up Your Mac’s Hard Drive appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

Why would I want to try Sparrow?

The answer is simple. Literally. The best part about and main selling point of Sparrow is the interface, which definitely seems to be inspired by the uber-popular Tweetie for Mac. With 4 buttons along the top for Composition, Reply, Archiving, and Deleting, and 5 along the left side for Inbox, Starred, Sent Mail, Drafts, and Trash, its basically a graphical representation of the Gmail inbox. This is super nice for a couple of reasons.

First, generally speaking, a simple, clean interface is a beautiful interface. With no clutter to speak of, it keeps your email looking nice. The second reason is that while its lacking some things, its got some nice extras. For instance, Sparrow has native Growl integration, meaning you get great, customizable pop-up alerts to your desktop, which of course Gmail on the web can’t do. One more positive for the interface is that it uses very little in the way of system resources, so its no problem to keep it running in the background.

Want to try it? Here’s how.

Download and installation, as well as setup, are super easy.  Head over to sparrowmailapp.com and click download beta. (Yes, beta, and we’ll come back to that soon). Once it is downloaded, the install is standard. When you start Sparrow for the first time, it will prompt you to set up your Gmail account. This is fantastic. Because Sparrow works exclusively with Gmail, all you do is enter your Gmail User name and Password, as well as your Name as you want it displayed.  Sparrow does the rest. It will sync your Inbox, Starred, Sent, and Drafts automatically, and then you can add as many accounts as you want from the File menu in your Menu bar. You can now access Sparrow super easily by clicking the envelope in the menu bar, or of course clicking it in the dock.

The Downsides

Let’s face it, no application, program, app, or dev is perfect, and this includes Sparrow. Here are the major problems to be concerned with. First of all, the app is in beta. This means you’re basically testing the app for the developers. While this is certainly something to keep in mind, also keep in mind that this is a super stable release. Really. I’ve been testing it for a couple weeks and have had minimal problems. Also remember though, that you will almost definitely find a bug at some point, so consider yourself warned!

The second, and much bigger problem with the app, is that is has no label support! Come on guys, this is Gmail! We need labels! Now don’t get me wrong, as I just mentioned, this is beta, and support could be added at any time, but I fully expect labels in a Gmail exclusive app, so here’s hoping!

What do you guys think of Sparrow? Do you prefer Gmail in your browser? Or something else? Tell me in the comments, and maybe that will be the focus of my next post!

Download Sparrow.

The post Sparrow Access Your Gmail Account On Desktop [Mac] appeared first on Make Tech Easier.

1. Twitter

If you’re in to Twitter at all, you are probably already imagining all the ways this could be useful. Frankly though, it even surprised me a little. While I expected the ability to be able to Tweet right from the toolbar, it goes a couple steps further. You can click the Tweet button to automatically Tweet the page you’re currently on, with the link already shortened for you, and then go ahead and continue writing your tweet. You can also quickly and easily see trending topics in real time, right in your toolbar, which was a nice piece of extra functionality I hadn’t expected.

2. MLB.com Toolbar

Anyone who knows me at all knows how much I love my Philadelphia Phillies. I’m constantly watching their games, reading about the team, checking scores and standings, and going back and forth with my friends about the Playoffs and World Series, and there are a ton of people out there with a love of the game like me. I even used the Phillies own National League East standings in an article on creating your own widgets back in July.  You can imagine how excited I was to find out there was an official MLB.com extension. The extension adds a toolbar to your browser that basically acts as the ticker does along the bottom of ESPN on your TV, but only for the MLB. It shows current scores, along with stats, and links to game coverage.

3. 1-Click Weather by Weather.com

The usefulness of 1-Click Weather might seem obvious, but what may not be as obvious is its perfect subtlety. 1-Click Weather does just what it says, it gives you one click access to Weather.com’s weather information. The way it does so though is great, and most of all unobtrusive. Rather than installing a full toolbar that could show you weather info that you may or may not need, and reduce the viewing area of your browser, 1-Click Weather adds a little button to the left of your address bar that has a little current temperature reading, and with one click takes you to the full site in a new tab for a more in-depth look at conditions in your set area.

4. Gmail Counter

Gmail Counter too, seems obvious. But again, its the perfect implementation that makes this extension great. Like 1-Click Weather, it simply adds a small email button to the left of your taskbar that will have a count show up if you have unread email messages.  While the implementation is great, and the app works wonders, what may be the best part is the fact that myself, as well as many Gmail users I know, are basically addicted to the service. This means we have Gmail open literally anytime our browser is. Now though, we don’t need to waste the system resources on it. Just add the extension and check your email if it pops up and tells you you’ve got new messages!

5. Click to Flash

Click to Flash might be my favorite extension out of all of these. Look, there is no debating Flash’s usefulness on the web. It absolutely exists and is used in innumerable web applications. The problem is that there is also no denying that Flash can be buggy, and is at the very least a huge battery drain. This is where Click to Flash comes in, and it solves these problems cleanly, easily, consistently, and perfectly. Once you install the Click to Flash extension, anytime Flash appears in your browser, rather than showing the ad, it will block it before it even loads (speeding up website loading times across the web) and will display the block with the word “Flash” in it. Then, if you click the box, that Flash portion of the page will load. If you don’t, it won’t and it won’t waste your time or resources loading it up. Its an elegant solution to a complex problem that one day may not exist, but for now is a huge one.

So what did I miss? Do you guys have certain extensions you love that we should know about?  Is there an extension you’d like to see that doesn’t exist? Tell us in the comments!

Get all these extensions and more from Apple’s extensions site

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