I just found out about Skim and I find it to be wildly useful for personal use, but I can imagine this could be a huge productivity booster for anyone in academia in particular. In short, Skim views any PDF files quickly as expected, but more importantly it allows you to take notes and [...]

Mac users are largely immune to the world of virus and trojans, but it’s not uncommon for you to be a Mac user in a LAN sea of Windows PC’s. The Conficker Virus is Windows only but it’s garnering a lot of attention, so if you’re on a Windows LAN at home, work, or [...]

MAMP: It stands for Mac Apache MySql PHP. It delivers on all four of these fronts and it does it very efficiently. MAMP is nice because you can install it (and delete it) without altering anything “built-in” to your OS X installation. Every file that MAMP needs and uses lives inside [...]

Seems simple right? It should be, however in Mac OS X Leopard there is not exactly a straight forward or easy way to lock your desktop. Of course you can use the System Preferences and enable the screensaver and sleep password functionality but I’m looking for something quicker. Thankfully I found this [...]

These days there are no shortage of ways to backup your Macintosh. Probably the most popular method available to an end-user is Apple’s Time Machine (first introduced in Mac OS X 10.5). Personally, I was very impressed with the ease of use offered by Time Machine, but I am a command line junkie [...]

Life is officially easier for front-end web developers, you can now easily test browser compatibility by running Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 concurrently with a great utility called MultiFirefox. Simply install MultiFirefox, then rename one of the Firefox applications (to say, Firefox 3), and upon launch you can select either application version to run. [...]

I recently came across a great utility called MacFUSE which allows Mac OS X users to read and write to NTFS partitions, amongst other things. This is extremely useful if you have an external storage device you use on both a Mac and PC, and you want to avoid the limitations of FAT32. Getting [...]

Earlier today Microsoft released the second beta of their Remote Desktop Connection application. This new version introduces an updated user interface (not sure if its worse or better), Universal binary support, Vista support, dynamic window resizing and quite a bit more. It is good to see Microsoft update this utility as it [...]

Gmail Notifier is a great little utility that lets you know when you have mail in your Gmail inbox. What I have always disliked about it though is the apparent lack of the ability to use the secure https protocol. If you’re on public networks, this can be a particularly valid concern for privacy [...]

If you’re anything like me, you’ve accidentally hit command-Q while in Safari and lost tons of important tabs. Unfortunately there’s no warning so if you make such a mistake, that’s that. Well, not quite anymore, thanks to TabStop. TabStop is a handy utility that causes Safari to warn you before closing a browser window [...]