utilitiesupdates

Written by Topher Kessler

Staff Pick: TimeMachineEditor

Time Machine is an exceptionally useful backup system, but its limitations can be frustrating to some users. While it is built to run regularly in the background and not impede on users' work, some people may wish to prevent it from running at certain times or customize the intervals in which it runs.

While you can do this customization by editing the Time Machine preferences files, using a utility like TimeMachineEditor is far more convenient. The utility is simple and straightforward, and allows for fine tuned adjustments of the Time Machine backup times.… Read more

Written by Topher Kessler

Staff Pick: LeopardAssist

Leopard's system requirements call for at least an 867MHz PowerPC G4 processor. If this requirment is not met, Leopard will not install on your system. While this is Apple's way of ensuring all features of Leopard run in usable ways, it does cut out a number of older and slower computers that will run most aspects of the operating system just fine.

LeopardAssist will fake an artificial 933MHz machine to the installer files, allowing Leopard to be installed on the machine. This is handy because it does not change any settings … Read more

Written by Topher Kessler

Staff Pick: Display Maestro

In order to make OS X system settings user-friendly for consumers, Apple has limited many of the settings to those that are most compatible and which users will most likely use. This is convenient; however, there are times when people may wish to have more control over their settings. This may be especially true for display settings, where options such as grey scale and 256-color modes have been removed.

Display Maestro brings these hidden settings back, allowing for fine-tuned control of display settings. These include custom resolutions and color depths, and makes … Read more

Written by Topher Kessler

Staff Pick: Winclone

Many Mac users have installed Windows to secondary partitions using Bootcamp, and in doing so can have important files on both their Mac and Windows partitions. This can make backing up rather cumbersome, especially if you are interested in being able to restore your operating systems to a fully functional state. For the Mac OS, a popular way to do this is to use a cloning program on the boot drive, but to do the same on Windows requires booting from Windows.

Winclone is a utility that allows you to easily clone your … Read more

Staff Pick: Smasher

Every now and then Mac users will run into font-related problems, which include garbled text displaying when typed, improper fonts being used, or the inability to display or use a font. While Apple's Font Book utility is useful for finding corrupted fonts, it is limited in what it can do.

Smasher is a utility that adds multiple extra checks for fonts, including repair and cache cleaning. If you are having problems with fonts, or manage many fonts for your projects, Smasher may be a good utility to have around.

The program has recently been updated to … Read more

Staff Pick: Checksum

We recently wrote a small article on how to run a checksum routine on files as an extra verification against file corruption or incorrect file download. The way to check this is to run a simple "openssl" terminal command for a specific message digest routine (SHA1, MD5, etc). For people who need to run checksums on either multiple files or very frequently, "Checksum" is a perfect utility for this.

Built as a cocoa wrapper to the built-in "openssl" command, it provides you with a drag-and-drop interface that will output the various … Read more

Staff Pick: atMonitor

atMonitor is a all in one view of the state of your system. Once installed, it runs and collects data and statistics about your system, displaying them in colorful and customizable graphs that will display in floating windows or in the menubar. You can set up triggers for threshold values, so you can execute scripts or perform other functions when the system surpasses a detected level for any measurement.

The measurements include the top 3 most CPU hungry processes, CPU, CPU Temperature, RAM, GPU, GPU Temperature, VRAM, FPS, Disk I/O and Net I/O. In addition, … Read more

Staff Pick: iStat pro

When troubleshooting hardware setups and OS installations, many times you will need to know a variety of statistics about the system such as fan speed, component temperatures, battery levels, various bandwidths, and network information.

iStat Pro is one of several utilities that will provide this information and other statistics about your system in 9 separate sections of the application to make them manageable and easy to follow.

The latest version (4.9) improves support for the latest MacBooks, and fixes various bugs with network and disk monitoring, among other minor bug fixes and enhancements.

You can … Read more

Staff Pick: Webmin

OS X comes with a variety of tools for setting up web sharing, handling user accounts, checking system resources, and providing other information about the system. The included utilities for these tasks are rather limited, and people trying to get more functionality and customization must use the command line to access and edit configuration files.

Webmin is a universal system administration package for Unix and Linux machines which also interfaces with OS X. This utility allows you to customize detailed information for users and groups, manage filesystems, edit bootup scripts and manage log files, change firewall rules, … Read more