Google is a great tool for searching anything on the universe. It’s so great, Apple put a Google search bar in Safari. The Google search bar is helpful and all, but it just takes too long to get your results. Well, with Inquisitor, you don’t wait for results, they’re instantaneous. Inquisitor replaces the Google search bar, while still using Google’s search engine. Once you enter your search query, up to 6 results will show up beneath the Inquisitor search bar. A must-have app for anyone who uses Safari a lot!
Every night before I am about to go to bed, I usually connect my iPod to my speakers and enable my iPod to be an alarm clock. Well, sometimes I forget to charge my iPod when it’s battery is low, so then I can’t use it as an alarm clock anymore. Instead I use my Mac to wake myself up. The creative folks over at Metaquark have an app for the Mac called Aurora. Aurora enables you to chose a time, playlist, and volume, for your alarm clock. A very useful feature with Aurora, is that it will wake up your Mac even if it’s asleep. Another terrific feature in Aurora, is that it will play your alarm in Front Row. You can be well assured that you will be awaken with Aurora!
Ever since Mac OS X has been out, there has been a consistent theme throughout each OS. In the Aqua interface you get the “brushed” metal look, shiny buttons, and those “horizontal lines”. After a year or so of using Mac OS X Tiger, you may get tired of the “brushed” metal look. Thankfully, there is a way to change this look and “unify” the interface. UNO will change your interface to UNO (looks like Mail’s interface), Shaded UNO, and the Default (Aqua). The nice feature is the ability to change which applications use UNO. For instance, you can set it up to make the “brushed” metal windows to look like the Shaded UNO texture. Another nice feature, is the ability to change the Application’s Skin. An example would be iTunes, with the new Aqua-grey interface, iTunes looks very different and somewhat inconsistent with the Mac OS X Aqua interface. UNO will enable you to revert iTunes back to the original Aqua-blue interface. That puts it all in a nutshell for you, now you just need to try it out.
Besides backing up my files, I figured it might also be important to maintain my Mac. When I searched for the best possible solution for maintaining Macs, I got many different answers. Some people said they only use Disk Utility to repair permissions. Others said they use applications like MainMenu and Yasu. I tried both of these apps and I liked MainMenu over Yasu for the ease of use. Still, I wasn’t sure that MainMenu was the best possible solution, so I kept looking. Then, I came across a miraculous utility called OnyX. It performs every possible maintenance task on your Mac. By using OnyX, I have increased the speed of my Mac, prevented a complete re-installation of Mac OS X Tiger, saved a trip from going to the Genius Bar, and saved a call to AppleCare. With OnyX you can: perform maintenance scripts, repair permissions, clear caches, rebuild Spotlight index, change your login screen, put the dock anywhere, change the screen capture format, edit the number of pages in Safari’s history, and a whole lot more. OnyX is an application that I can’t live without.
When I download an application for my Mac, I usually pick out one that fits in with the Aqua interface. Since WordPress doesn’t work very well with Safari due to a JavaScript error in Safari, I had to get another browser to use for posting to my site. First, I checked out Firefox. It was great until I saw that the widgets looked “Windows-ish”. By widgets, I’m talking about the buttons you see that say “search” or “submit”. I just couldn’t stand the look of them. I did some more searching and came across a beautiful browser called Camino. It has a lot of features I was looking for: website icons show up in the bookmarks bar, works with WordPress, Aqua widgets, and very fast speed. If you are looking for a replacement for Firefox, then go check out Camino.
