Whenever I notice my Mac is starting to run a little sluggish or when my laptop’s small solid state drive is running low on space I usually run one or the combination of Cocktail and CleanMyMac. Also, because I have a Macbook Pro and a Hackintosh the MacBook Pro is only used when I’m traveling or at a remote location where I can’t use my Hackintosh. The problem with this is OSX runs daily, weekly, and monthly scripts that get skipped if the laptop is not on, causing things to slow down a bit.

Cocktail - Pilot Tab

Cocktail

The first one I want to talk about is Cocktail. Cocktail is the free one of the two and by itself can do most of the work. All you need to do is download the app, install it, open it and go to the “Pilot” tab. From the “Pilot” tab select all the check boxes and hit run. This will run all the tasks at once. You can have it play a sound or quit when it is done as well. If you don’t want to do things automatically you also have the option of going through each one of the settings and doing them that way. Cocktail will run those daily, weekly, monthly scripts I was telling you about as well as clear caches, repair disk permissions, and clear log files. There is also a bunch of other cool things it can do such as tweak your Network settings and enable/disable certain default Mac settings that could slow or speed up your computer.

CleanMyMac

CleanMyMac

While this next one is not free, it is also not that expensive, only costing $14 dollars for a 6 month membership or $29 for a lifetime membership to the application. It is also not absolutely needed to get your Mac running smoothly but it is nice to have as a backup to catch what Cocktail misses. When you get this and open it just click the green “Scan” button and when it is done scanning hit the blue “Clean” button and your done. When it is finished it will tell you how much space you saved. The Application itself cleans your Caches, Logs Unneeded Langauge Files, Universal Binaries, System Junk, and Trash. It also comes with a Quick Erase to quickly erase files and an Uninstall Applications utility ,and lastly it comes with a Extensions Manager. So overall you are getting more features than just some basic maintenance program. 

Lifehacker just pointed me to PDFExpert as “The Best PDF Viewer/Editor for iPhone“, and now I plan on using this to handle my on site work orders. A lot of my work orders are sent in PDF format that I usually print out, make the changes, scan the paper, convert it to PDF, then send it back to the company. With this I can simply save the PDF to a DropBox location, edit it onsite with my iPhone or iPad, have them sign it, and then email it directly to the company. This will also help with the economy and environment by making everything paperless.

If you do any kind of contract work and usually get your work orders in PDF format then you too should check this out. It will make the job a lot easier and if you are like me it will make your tech notes legible.

Read more to see the features

Features (From Lifehacker’s Article)

• Works with PDFs, iWork documents, Microsoft Office files, Powerpoint presentations, text files, images, music, and video
• Highlight text in multiple ways
• Fill out and sign forms
• Create notes on your PDFs
• Draw on a document with your finger when annotating
• Underline and strike-through words when annotating
• Bookmark document locations
• Copy files via iTunes, Wi-Fi, iDisk, Dropbox, Google Docs, and more
• Save email attachments from Mail directly to PDFExpert
• Email annotated files directly from PDFExpert
• Lock down the app with a password to keep your documents secure

I just read an article from Lifehacker saying Google has announced on its official blog thatGoogle+ is now in public beta and no longer requires an invitation to use it. The downside is there is still no support for Google Apps users. So I guess us poor Google Apps users will still have to wait in the background to use this service, or is it even worth using?

I just read an email saying that Parallels Desktop 7 for the Mac is going to be coming out very soon. Parallels has also said that if you are a current owner of the software you are entitled to an upgrade for just $49. This is a good chance for you Parallels 5 owners who are running OS X Lion because that version and prior versions are not compatible with Lion. If you have version 6 I recommend you just stick with 6. I run version 6 and have no problems.  

Here is what the email said about the new features:

FASTER – Performs 60% faster than Parallels Desktop 6.
NEW – Support for OS X Lion Fullscreen mode, Launchpad, Mission Control and more.
ENHANCED – Faster graphical user interface built on 64-bit technology.
FASTER – Display graphics 45% faster than Parallels 6.
ENHANCED – Start, stop and resume Windows more quickly.
ENHANCED – Access and work faster with Windows and Mac files.
NEW – Run even more games and 3D applications with support for up to 1GB video memory.
NEW – All new help and documentation makes it easy to find the information you need.
ENHANCED – Support for all Mac OS printers now available in Windows.
NEW – Run OS X Lion as a guest OS.
ENHANCED – Reduced CPU usage improves notebook battery life.
NEW – Support for high-quality audio formats up to 192KHz.
NEW – Purchase and download Windows from within Parallels Desktop.
NEW – Immerse yourself in games, music and videos with 7.1 Surround Sound.
NEW – Easily share your iSight or FaceTime HD camera between Mac and Windows applications.
Plus – 90-day money back guarantee

And much, much more

Todays app over at App of the Day is Print to PDF that allows you to easily print anything you could normally print on your iOS device to a PDF file. This makes it very easily to look up what you printed to PDF such as a website or email for future references. Simply launch the app to start the printer, go to the Mail, Safari or any app with AirPrint support and use the ‘Print’ function to save your information as PDF.

Price: $3.99

If you don’t know what Skitch is, it’s probably the best screen capturing tool for the Mac and now Android. It has now been acquired by Evernote and made free to use. Also there is no longer any more advertisments or restrictions on the free version.  Skitch also works well with Evernote making it easy to draw or capture screen images and quickly edit them and drag/drop them into Evernote. Skitch is not a “must have” for the Mac when running Evernote.

You can grab Skitch for free at the Apple Store

With Lion Tweaks by iFredrik you can easily fix or change some of the annoying features found in OS X Lion. This is a must have if you miss some of the old features like the built in FTP server or natural scrolling, and you just need a quick way to get the “Work around”. The best thing about this tool is its completely free, just head on over to iFredrik and grab it.

What you can change is:

• Enable/Disable the user Library folder.
• Change to a 2D or 3D dock.
• Enable/Disable system window animation.
• Enable/Disable mail reply animation.
• Remove/Add Reading List Icon in Safari.
• Enable/Disable Spelling Correction.
• Enable/Disable repeating keys.
• Enable/Disable permanent scrollbars.
• Show Hidden Files.
• Disable Crash Dialog Pop-Up.
• Get a new Stack List View.
• Highlight Stack items on mouseover.
• Change iCal leather interface to aluminium
• Change Address Book leather interface to aluminium
• NEW: Disable resume for a single app
• NEW: Enable the hidden FTP-server
• NEW: Customize Launchpad folder background

Here is a list of some of the most common Mac applications that I use. I think I use just about every one of these at least once a day, and I would hate to not have any of these applications as they are all very important. They start out as simple word processing applications to torrent applications to coding applications. This is also not everything I use.

I have to give it to Bill Gates and Microsoft when they came up with the idea of window snapping. If you are not familiar with it, what it allows you to do is maximize a window or put two windows side by sad by dragging them to the top or side of your screen. So I was on the search to find out how to do this with Mac, although there is many other ones out there I ran into iSnap which comes in at a great price of only .99 cents.

With the iSnap app, you can organize various windows to fit perfectly on your screen and access them simultaneously.

By clicking and dragging your windows to various sections on your screen, you can optimize productivity with a snap. iSnap offers you 3 different templates to choose for optimal productivity.

BONUS FEATURE:
For a limited time, purchasing iSnap also includes iShake! iShake allows you to grab any window and by shaking it, it automatically minimizes every other window except the one you shook. By shaking again, it will restore all previously minimized windows.

Extras:
Take advantage of keyboard shortcuts that allow you to give your trackpad a break.

Link to product

I recently purchased a brand new Apple TV 2 and was very upset as to how closed it is. I wanted to replace my big PC running Boxee with the Apple TV. and rent movies from it seeing how the local BlockBuster is closing. Below you will find a video from HD Nation discribing a lot of reasons why I hate the Apple TV and below that is a list of why I hate it.

Here are some of the reasons why I am taking it back and switching back to the Boxee.

1. No Pandora – Yea no Pandora..crazy!
2. No Keyboard – Just the original Apple Remote. This is important for me as I like to be able to search for content FAST not hunt and scroll.
3. Limited Flickr Support – The Flickr support is ridiculous on this and way better on the Boxee. You have no way to add your account so how do you view priviate photos. Maybe there is a way I’m just Apple Tv dumb?
4. Adding “Non iTunes Movies” – This is really nice in Boxee, as long as you have the move file named correctly it finds the Movie art and Meta Data for you automaticaly. Not so much for iTunes and Apple TV. Also with the Apple TV you have to have a computer with iTunes running to view the movies where with Boxee it just needs to be a shared hard drive or something like that.
5. Closed – Unless you jailbreak your Apple TV it is very closed. You can’t add new mediums or apps for content like you can for Boxee.
6. No Browser – Yea thats right no browsing the internet.
7. No 1080p – The Apple TV only supports 720p.

Some other things I’d like to see

I’d also like to see online movie content providers offering subscription based content. I have a pass (or did) at BlockBuster with Unlimited movie and game rentals with no due dates and up to 2 movies out at a time for around $30 dollars, why can’t Vudu or iTunes provide this kind of subscription based process for online media? I think Netflix is the closes to this but it can take up to 7years before they get the latest content on their online database.