Tag: OS X (Page 2 of 3)

My Suite of Apps: Gemini

December 12, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve mentioned in previous posts in this series that I’m pretty big on how I organize my photos. That is, I use a service for backing them up, and a utility to make sure that they are also stamped with the proper date and time as per the EXIF data.

But another challenge that comes with managing not only photos, but other files such as MP3s (be it music, podcasts, eBooks, documents, and so on) is making sure that you don’t have duplicate files lying around the file system.

To be clear, sometimes you may want the same copy of multiple files. For example, say you buy an album from Hammock and then you drop a couple of tracks from them on a playlist or a, gasp, mix CD, then you wouldn’t want to delete both copies of the files.

In any case, if you’re trying to keep your pictures, documents, MP3s, and other files in as lean as shape as possible, I recommend Gemini for identifying, locating, and removing duplicate files.

My Suite of Apps: Pastebot

December 5, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the most convenient features of Yosemite and iOS is Continuity which supports Handoff. The whole idea behind it is that you can be using an application on your desktop and then pickup where you left off on your iOS device.

For example, say I was looking up directions in Maps on my desktop and then needed to head to my car into order to reach my destination. Handoff allows me to open up Maps on my phone and have it display exactly what I was viewing on my desktop.

Convenient, sure, but this post isn’t meant to be a commercial for all things OS X / iOS. Instead, it’s meant to highlight an application that helps cover a shortcoming of the seamless integration between the devices.

Namely, Pastebot.

My Suite of Apps: Better Rename 9

November 28, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I received my first digital camera in the early 2000’s as a birthday present (though I had used my parents’ Sony Mavica and a few floppy disks for years prior) and I’ve done what I can to save every picture and video taken with that camera and every digital camera I’ve had – including phones – ever since.

I’m not a photographer by any means – not even a hobbyist – but I, like anyone else, takes pictures during any kind of event that’s going on. And since becoming a dad, I’m taking pictures nearly every day since, you know, kids do something new all the time ;).

Anyway, this means that I have a little over 10 years worth of pictures and videos archived. I’m compulsive about their organization (and I’m also a little paranoid about losing them which has lead to a multisite backup strategy, but that’s for another post).

That is, I organize all of the photos by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second – or I try to do so up to whatever the greatest level of detail is. Since phones and digital cameras keep so much information in their EXIF data, this is relatively easy to do.

But cameras haven’t always kept so much information in their EXIF data.

My Suite of Apps: Picturelife

November 14, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

There are a lot of services that have come up in recent years all of which are designed to provide a level of photo storage and/or to provide you a way to “back in time” to see pictures that were taken n-number of years ago.

And it’s fun, right? I mean, who doesn’t dig seeing what they were doing, tweeting, or sharing a year, two years, …, or 11 years ago?

Such is what the Internet has brought us.

Anyway, when I set out to find a service that I wanted to use to backup all of my pictures and videos, I was looking for several criteria:

Unlimited back up
Web application
iOS Application
“Memory” feature to see things that happened over however-many-years ago

There’s a lot of options out there for this – some are free, some are paid, some require Facebook for authentication – some do part of what I wanted, some do other parts of what I wanted except for Picturelife.

It does it all (that is, all that I want).

My Suite of Apps: Safari

November 11, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I know – Chrome is arguably the best web browser (or at least the most popular) on the market right now. Ever since the first version was released, I used it religiously (and I used Firebug and Firefox when I needed developer tools until Chrome’s finally shipped).

But when the latest version of OS X shipped, I decided to give Safari a try if for no other reason to see if the claims about its speeds were true, and to take advantage of Continuity.

Like any other web developer, I still have other browsers sitting on my machine so that I can use them for testing and so on, but I’ve actually been using nothing but Safari since Yosemite’s launch and I haven’t missed my other browsers.

In fact, I’ve enjoyed using Safari more than any other browser because of its integration with other devices.