IndexSoftware

Flow is a smart new FTP client for transferring files built specifically to use the new features found in Leopard.

The applications supports FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, .Mac and local connections and lets you carry out multiple transfers at once. Although it doesn’t offer tabbed views, which I find absolutely necessary when working with different connections at once, it uses QuickLook to visualize files quickly in your Finder.

The interface is clean and simple, giving you the transfer rate for each file and a little progress bar to let you know has much has been uploaded/ downloaded. Programmers will enjoy having a built-in editor to modify code

The best feature of Flow surely is dropmarks. After creating a droplet in Flow, all you’ll have to do is drag any file onto it to transfer it. Easy as pie!

Although it doesn’t offer tabbed views, Flow is a smart new FTP client that makes great use of Leopard technology. Dropmarks are an excellent way of transferring files.

Review by Cyril Roger

To survive the theft or crash of your Mac you need to make sure you have backups of your most important files. Always overlooked by users, this boring yet necessary task can be easily handled by Time Machine if you have Leopard. If not you’ll have to choose a backup program.

BackityMac lets you select what you consider to be your most important files and save them in a dmg. The application offers a simple menu view from which you check the files you’d like to backup, such as Apple Mail files, iCal calendars, or iPhoto and iTunes libraries.

You can save files in a disk image (dmg) or have them burned in a CD or DVD. BackityMac can also restore all your files at the click of a button. A lesser known yet smart feature of BackityMac is that it can import music stored on your iPod back into your iTunes library, in case you’ve lost it.

BackityMac is simple to use but does include some limitations. For one you won’t be able to properly clone your hard drive, meaning you’re liable to forget files in the backup process. You won’t be able to make incremental backups either so every time you want to save new files you’ll have to start from scratch.

In all, BackityMac is a good program for those of you looking for a basic backup solution. For serious backups, find a program which can clone your hard drive, or use Time Machine.

Review by Cyril Roger

Have you ever need to copy specific sections of emails, but could not waste time going through each and every one?

MailCM is a preference and contextual menu item to quickly find and copy to clipboard specific properties of an email. It works in Apple Mail and can recover elements like the header message, source, reply to or recipient address. To use it all you have to do is select the emails you need to retrieve, right click, select MailCM from the dropdown menu, then the property you wish to copy.

MailCM was a little difficult to install. We had to copy the plugin to the Contextual Menu folder in Library and restart Apple Mail to get it to appear. However once setup, it proved to be very handy and certainly saved lots of time when looking for properties in many emails.

Although a little difficult to install, MailCM is a good Apple Mail contextual menu item which copies message properties in one go.

Review by Cyril Roger

There’s no need to extract the whole zip file just to see what’s inside. Just drag files and folders from all around your hard drives, disks, or network places into your new zip file. Because first copying them into a temporary folder is really lame.

Drag in new or updated files, remove any file or folder from the archive, or move files around inside the archive. If you only need this one file from your archive, you don’t have to extract the whole thing and remove all the other files. Simply drag those files you need out into the Finder. Strip Mac specific files and resource forks from zip files and tar balls for best compatibility with less powerful systems like Windows or Linux.

Meet the new irresistible recorder for your Mac. Funky, fun-to-use, effortless, and yet useful, it does for your microphone what Photo Booth does for the webcam. Check it out and make it a part of your application library today.

To get iTunes out of the way, when I’m playing tracks, I like to minimize it. However that means having to hover the mouse over the dock icon to know what song is playing.

With Playwatch you can follow what tracks are playing in iTunes straight from the menu bar. The applications is highly customizable and you can choose what font and colors are used. You can even set ticker speed, delay and HUD delay.

The most interesting bit, although a little complicated to set up, has to do with the iTunes info. You can customize the order in which information appears in the Playwatch HUD. For example for radio tunes you want to see first the url and for albums the name of the song. Information lines for each music type can be rearranged and linked together.

A neat little feature is that Playwatch also showcases album art. One thing we found a little strange is that Preferences open up as a separate application.

Playwatch is a useful little menu bar item to have so you can always know what song is playing in your iTunes.

Review by Cyril Roger

Miss the “opposite corners” shutdown keyboard shortcut on your new Mac aluminium keyboard? ProSutdown restores it.

Since the eject button has been moved from the top right to the center of your keyboard, ProShutdown replaces it with the F19 key, so you can still use “opposite corners” to quickly shutdown your Mac. Pressing CTRL + F19 once ProShutdown is launched will bring up the shut down window. To make it work you need to make sure that ProShutdown is runnng , which you can quickly see from the menu bar.

You’ll still be able to use CTRL + Eject but obviously it won’t feel as natural as what ProShutdown offers. Overall though, ProShutdown is a fairly basic tool and will only real appeal to those of you that miss “opposite corners” shutdown. It’s a shame that the tool doesn’t let you customize keyboard shortcut for shutdown.

ProShutdown is a simple tool to bring back “opposite corners” shutdown on your new aluminium Mac keyboard. Not essential but some users will be glad it’s there.

Review by Cyril Roger

Behind a colorful interface, Checkup is a promising application for analyzing processes on your Mac.

Developed specifically for Leopard, Checkup serves a shiny new interface that you only find in the latest Mac programs. It’s very easy to browse through the main sections, presented as big tabbed icons on the top of the window. Most of the action takes place in the center of the screen, as the top part of the program is reserved for alerts, tools, and preferences. It also features a graph view of your Mac’s activity.

In terms of features, Checkup covers all the areas you’d want to analyze, from processes to network, disks, system and processors. Information is fairly detailed, thanks to a balanced mix between numbers and graphs. You’ll also be able to set up alerts to notify you via Growl and prepare up specific usage reports. Although it’s still unstable and can crash every now and then (after all it’s still a preview), Checkup is a good tool to analyze your processes.

Checkup lets you check up on your Mac’s processes in a well designed interface.

Review by Cyril Roger

If you’re one of those people who orders lots of stuff from the Internet and waits with baited breath by the door every morning only to be disappointed when all that comes into the mailbox is another bill, then you may want to check out Delivery Status. The nice-looking Dashboard widget gives you information about the status of your delivery from numerous carriers, including Amazon, DHL and UPS.

Firstly, you get details of the expected time of arrival. Thereupon, you can check the exact location of a package at the time, along with the amount of time left before it’s safely in your hands - all from your Dashboard. You can even set the widget to provide you with automatic updates when the status of your delivery changes. Although the database of shipping companies is far from comprehensive, Delivery Status provides a great way for impatient people to see where their order is. It also saves all the hassle and cost of checking with the carrier every five minutes.

Review by James Thornton

Path Finder is an innovative file browser and manager with powerful tools to make you more productive on Mac OS X. Designed from the ground up for maximum speed and Mac OS X integration, Path Finder has a gorgeous, accessible interface that you can customize to your heart’s content.

Mac OS X 10.4 has been sometimes called the “programmer’s release” of Mac OS X, and Path Finder takes advantage of many of the new methods and programming tools Tiger has to offer. Path Finder gives you multiple ways of finding the files you’re looking for, with Tiger’s new Spotlight search built right into the application. Don’t like Spotlight? Path Finder also boasts a Spotlight-independent fast search that quickly finds the files you’re looking for. You can also use the brand new Filter tool to quickly filter the current directory by name, extension, or kind.

Everything is customizable. Want to move sidebar items such as the Shelf, Volumes list, or Preview pane to any location in the file browser window? Interested in creating a sidebar pane that shows the contents of a specific folder? Want to hide the new Split Preview pane? All of this (and more) is under your control.

Path Finder 4’s brand new Select Tool gives you the ability to select files using a plethora of criterion with lightning speed. Need to select all of the image files in a directory containing hundreds of files? It’s no sweat with the Select tool. You can also use the Select tool to highlight files by modification date, characters in the filename, and many other criteria.

Allume’s Stuffit engine is now fully integrated into Path Finder. With Mac OS X 10.4 no longer including Stuffit Expander, this means you can quickly and easily compress and decompress many common file compression formats from within Path Finder. No more waiting for changes to appear in file listings or on the desktop. With Path Finder 4 changes happen as you make them, so you can feel confident that what you see in Path Finder truly is what you get.

There’s an icon size slider right in the file browser, and you can now size icons up to Tiger’s gigantic new 256×256 icon size. On that note, Path Finder can now generate image icon previews on the fly, which will be very handy for designers, photograhpers, and anyone with lots of image files.

Path Finder 4 now has an Bookmark Bar that gives you another way of quickly accessing favorite folders. The new View Options window organizes an incredible array of customizations and view option for the discerning interface jockey. There’s a new “Contents” contextual menu that allows you to navigate inside directories for super-fast access.