FunctionFlip… I like the media keys on my MacBook keyboard – just not all of them. Fat-fingered that I am, I regularly skip tracks when I just want to pause. Disabling all of the keys just won’t do, because I use the brightness and volume keys every day.
FunctionFlip individually controls your Macbook or Macbook Pro’s function keys, turning special keys back to regular F-keys, or vice-versa.
FunctionFlip requires that “Enable access for assistive devices” be checked on the Universal Access pane in System Preferences.
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NetNewsWire is an easy-to-use RSS and Atom newsreader for Mac OS X. Its familiar three-paned interface—similar to Apple Mail—can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news. Features include:
- A tabbed browser lets you read web pages with the convenience of staying in the same window.
- Search your news items with a standard Apple search widget, like in Mail and other applications.
- Downloads podcasts and enclosures, and sends podcasts to iTunes with with your choice of genre and playlist.
- The flagged items feature lets you mark items that you want to keep — they stay forever or until you mark them as unflagged.
- Mac OS X 10.5 compatible, and includes Automator actions to control functions in NetNewsWire.
- Other features include syncing, smart lists, search subscriptions, built-in styles, and AppleScript support.
- Includes a built-in categorized list of feeds that can be easily subscribed to.
- If NetNewsWire Lite is already running, quit it before running NetNewsWire.
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Carbon Copy Cloner… Clone, synchronize, backup. Schedule and forget it. Try it ’til you trust it.
In its simplest form, CCC will clone one hard drive to another, copying every single block or file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive. This is very useful if, for example, your laptop is damaged and you must send it in for repair.
CCC can also be used to perform regular backups of your data. When you select a source disk in CCC, you are presented with the contents of that disk (hidden items too). Simply uncheck the items that you do not want to backup, and CCC will provide ample indication what will and will not be copied. Select a target disk to which you would like to backup, then press the clone button.
The key to a successful backup plan is to actually do the backups regularly. When left to a human, the task often gets tacked on to the end of a very long list of other things to do. When you eventually have a catastrophe, the data is simply gone. You know that feeling — you just lost six years of family photos. Your kids being born, their first birthdays, their first everything. The answer to this is consistent and regular backups, placed on a schedule and handled automatically by your computer. CCC includes that functionality, and takes it even further.
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Cocoa Packet Analyzer is a native Mac OS X implementation of a network protocol analyzer and packet sniffer. It uses the industry-standard PCAP packet capture format for reading, capturing and writing packet trace files.
Supports the Cocoa bundles technology for creating TCP/IP application layer protocol “Analyzer PlugIns”. Features a quicklook plugin.
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SMARTReporter is an application that can warn you of some hard disk drive failures before they actually happen! It does so by periodically polling the S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard disk drive. S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a technology built into most modern hard disk drives that acts as an “early warning system” for pending hard disk drive problems. SMARTReporter can notify you of impending hard disk drive failures by sending e-mails, displaying a warning dialog or executing an application. The current status of your hard disk drives is always displayed through the customizable menu item. Because SMARTReporter relies on the S.M.A.R.T. implementation of Mac OS X, it only supports ATA, SATA or eSATA hard disk drives, if you want S.M.A.R.T. support for your FireWire hard disk drive, send feedback to Apple. Please note that a S.M.A.R.T. alert doesn’t mean that your HDD will completely fail for sure, nor can S.M.A.R.T. catch all possible HDD errors – it’s just a very valuable indicator.
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