MacBack buys MacBooks while you keep your distance

Like many people in the US and UK, I’ve been spending the past few weeks hiding from Covid-19 by staying inside and seeking solace and comfort from my Mac. And after weeks of video conferences and many hours spent at the keyboard, I’m starting to think I deserve a new computer.

Upgrading to a new Mac would mean selling my current Mac. I have sold several computers before, using eBay and other platforms, but that game has changed now that a nasty virus is dictating the terms of our social and business interaction. I’m not enthused about meeting with strangers to show my computer or close a sale.

Now I think a service like MacBack offers a much more safe and secure way to sell my computer or other Apple device.

The process starts on the MacBack website where you fill out a short form with details about your computer’s age, condition and specifications.

After you submit the form, MacBack quickly gives you a price quote. If you accept the offer, MacBack will dispatch a courier to pick up your computer at no charge and at a time that you specify. The service uses shipping boxes that are specially designed to hold and protect your particular model.

MacBack checks to see that you have included all accessories, then it tests the computer to confirm its specs and condition. That process typically takes about 48 hours. If there are no issues, MacBack send your payment using either PayPal or a bank transfer.

Check the video below to see how the service works and visit the MacBack website to find out what you can get for your MacBook.

By: Ric Manning On 5/22/2020

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FreshBooks has choice accounting tools for Macs

We're closing in on the end of another year and that means I've gone another 12 months using  home-brewed and half-baked accounting system to run my home-based business.

Maybe 2018 will be the year that I'll get serious about my business and get a quality accounting package like FreshBooks.

As someone who uses two Macs and a variety of iOS devices, FreshBooks sounds like the obvious choice. It tracks projects, financial reports, time logs, and invoices and keeps everything synchronized, whether I'm using a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

One key element of FreshBooks is the ability to quickly generate and deliver an invoice to a client, which means you're likely to get paid faster.

The invoices are customized with a business's brand and logo and clients get a personalized thank you email. And users can offer their clients a variety of online payment options, which can also make money move faster.

Other tools will record business expenses and track time spent by you and your team members on different projects. The FreshBook reporting features give clients a clear picture of how much time and money you devoted to their project.

And maybe my tax preparer will give me a discount when I give hime reports and summaries instead of notes and spreadsheets.

FreshBooks offers a free 30-day trail and doesn't require a credit card to take the test drive.

For more details, visit the FreshBooks website and check out the video below. You can also follow @freshbooks on Twitter.

By: Ric Manning On 12/04/2017

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Flipboard and screen grabs keep me plugged in

Count me among the many fans of Flipboard who were delighted when the mobile app made the jump to the Web last year.

For me, Flipboard has become a reliable and often entertaining way to keep up on topics of interest, from consumer technology to online security and website design with side helpings of politics, movies and current news.

I like Flipboard’s option to create a personal magazine based on those topics, but I often need to collect images of what I see when I click through to the original source of an article I see on Flipboard.

Those sites typically display a line of action buttons to share an article on social media or send the URL by email. But almost never see a option built into a Web page that lets me take a screen shot. And in many cases, that’s just what I want - an image that captures the headline, byline, posting date and URL.

In the days when I did my work on a Windows PC, I could get a quick screen shot by pressing a key labelled PrtScr. There’s no such key on my iMac keyboard, so I went looking for a print screen Mac tool.

I found a simple guide that explained which key combinations to use to capture different images and have the resulting graphic file helpfully dropped on my desktop. Tony Tran’s article explains the steps to get snapshots of a full screen or selected areas. His tips have been a big help for my Flipboard research.

By: Ric Manning On 11/17/2016

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This flash drive has USB and Lightning plugs

My iMac contains more than 100 home videos and movies along with thousands of songs and photos. That’s far too much material to store on my iPhone or iPad, but it’s the perfect situation for the i-Memory Flash Drive made by ADATA.

The UE710 drive pairs flash memory with both a USB plug and an Apple-certified Lightning plug. I can copy items from my desktop or portable Mac using the USB drive, then use the Lightning plug to display or play back the content on a phone or tablet.

The connector plugs are accessible by moving a slider switch on the side of the flash drive. Slide up to get the Lightning plug, slide down to reveal the USB plug.

The drive supports USB 3.0 for fast transfers and it will play back high-density files such as 4K video or RAW image files. It also comes with a free iOS app to manage files and it works with Windows PCs as well as Macs.

That versatility makes it a handy device for travel, for doing business work on an iPad or for any situation where you need to access files from a variety of devices.

The 64GB version of the i-Memory Flash Drive that I tested sells for about $90 on Amazon. The drive is also available in 32GB and 128GB versions.

By: Ric Manning On 5/28/2016

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PDF utility offers advanced features

Mac users who frequently deal with Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) are likely to become frustrated if they can only read or preview the documents. The Mac software developer Cisdem has created a utility that lets users do much more than read a PDF  document.

PDFManagerUltimate includes several advanced editing features that let users merge, split and compress documents; add comments, annotations and sticky notes; rotate and highlight pages and elements; and extract text and images.

The program also incorporates OCR technology that will convert a scanned PDF into a variety of other file formats such as HTML, EPUB, PPT and files for Word, Excel or Keynote. You can also add a signature to a PDF file and encrypt the file with a password.

The program has a price tag of $69.99 and there’s a free trial version available to download at the Cisdem website.

By: Ric Manning On 11/18/2015

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Free software creates HTML5 videos

Gizmo Editor Review: 

Now that there are grandchildren in my life, I’m spending more time shooting, editing and publishing video. With family members in six states asking for more videos, I’ve created a website for posting and sharing clips and my blockbusters.

YouTube, of course, will store the videos and provide code for embedding a player on a web page. But I’ve also found an interesting alternative that doesn’t require me to surrender my content. Easy HTML5 Video is a free processing utility that will convert video from any common format into HTML5.

What’s HTML5? It’s a recently-developed markup language (the fifth version of the HTML standard) that plays video on a variety of platforms (desktop, mobile, tablet etc.) and works with all of the most widely-used browsers. Have you ever tried to play a video and been told you need a codec or a different player or a newer version of Flash? HTML5 avoids all that nonsense.

With HTML5, you don’t have to upload your clips and movies to some third-party resource like YouTube. The video stays on your server where it can be easily updated and where you control who gets to see it.

And, as its name proclaims, Easy HTML5 Video could hardly be easier to use. I downloaded and installed the Mac version from the Easy HTML5 Video website, which asked for my email address but did not require registration or any personal information.

Once launched, the software presents a drag-and-drop window where I deposited an MP4 video that I had created in iMovie using video from a Periscope session on my iPhone. The program starts by asking you to select a poster image. You can select a frame from the video or upload a separate image.

Next, you select compatibility options for the output file. Do you want Ogg, WebM and low-res MP4? Just click those icons. Don’t care about Flash? Leave it unchecked. You can also change resolution quality in steps from 240p up to 4K.

Converting my 2-minute video took less than 10 minutes and I couldn’t see any loss of quality in the converted version. Once the process is finished, the program offers to export your new video to a local folder or to an FTP directory. It also provides a code block for inserting the video, with player controls, directly into an HTML page.

The Easy HTML5 Video website has more details and free versions of the software for Windows or Mac.  With the free version, there are no limits to the number of conversions you can make for non-profit use, but it does apply a watermark to the converted video. There’s a commercial version for $69 and an enterprise version is $99.

By: Ric Manning On 11/03/2015

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Do Your Data recovers lost files and folders

Back in the 1990s, losing stored data was a full-blown disaster. There was software that could recover erased or damaged sectors on a hard drive or restore a blown partition, but it was a difficult job that took most of a full day. Today, there are sophisticated utility programs like Do Your Data that make data recovery fast and painless.

Do Your Data says it will find and restore lost data from a local hard drive, an external hard drive or a lost partition and it works with a wide range of devices including servers and RAID arrays.

The recovery program works with all common file formats for photos, videos, emails, audio, documents and folders and it doesn’t care whether you accidentally formatted a drive, got a virus infection or saw your operating system crash.

Do Your Data is available in formats for Windows (including Windows 10) and Macs. There’s also a Mac program that recovers iPhone files. You cab download a trail version for free or buy the full package. Prices for a single user version start at $34.50.

For more details, visit the Do Your Data website.  

By: Ric Manning On 9/13/2015

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Mac utility recovers lost data from iOS devices

Multitasking isn't always a good idea, especially if you're driving a car or managing the files on your iPhone. When your mind is focusing on several different things, it's easy to hit the Delete button when you meant to click Save.

When that happens - and you know it will - it's good to remember that all is not lost. The folks at Global shareware have developed iFoneMate, a desktop program that will recover lost data iPhones and other Apple iOS devices including tablets and the iPod Touch. 

iFoneMate for Macs  is designed to recover data from Contacts, Call History, Calendar, Message and Photo Stream plus WhatsApp and Safari bookmarks. The program can find data lost data stored iTunes and iCloud or data that;'s still resides on the iOS device.

When lost data is found, users can preview it before moving it to a computer. They can also make some modifications before storing it.

iFoneMate for Macs costs $49.95 at the Globalshareware website. 

By: Ric Manning On 8/18/2015

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Immortal Files makes backups while you work

We’ve all been taught to back up our computer files, but that doesn’t protect us from every consequence of our mistakes. I’ve ruined an text file, then delved into my backups only to find that the saved file was seriously out of date and contained none of my recent changes.

Immortal Files for Macs was designed for just that kind of situation. While a typical backup program might copy files every night, Immortal Files makes a copy any time a file is revised. It’s a process that gives you access to any past version of a file.

The software runs on Mac’s OS X to store multiple file versions in the cloud. The program tracks changes in files and copies only those files that were changed. Files are copied automatically, as they are revised. The copied data is encrypted for extra security and the program continues to work, even when you lose your Internet connection.

Immortal Files costs $39.95 for a single user. More details and an expanded list of advanced features are available on the Immortal Files website and you can follow @FilesBackup on Twitter.

By: Ric Manning On 8/04/2015

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Disk Drill finds deleted files for Windows and Macs

Sometimes the files you delete stick around for a while in your desktop trash bin and sometimes they are, you know, deleted, gone, kaput, never to be seen again.

Well, maybe not never. I wouldn’t give up the search until after I tried Disk Drill.

The file-recovery utility from 508 Software earned its reputation digging for deleted files on Mac hard drives and other devices including external hard drives, cameras, iPods, USB flash drives, Kindles, and memory cards.

The program scans storage locations ad displays a list of files that can potentially be recovered. It will also rebuild damaged partitions and deploy the Recovery Vault, which tracks deleted files and remembers file names and data locations.

Disk Drill is now available in a program that works the same margin on Windows computers, including those running Windows XP or later versions. Visit the Disk Drill website and it will direct you to Disk Drill for Macs or Disk Drill for Windows.

Disk Drill PRO for Mac OSX costs $89, the Windows version is free.

By: Ric Manning On 6/03/2015

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Free Mac app downloads YouTube videos

A couple of years ago worked on a presentation to an audience of police and security officials. We wanted to show a YouTube video on a Mac, but there would be no Internet access at our location.

We had to use an expensive screen-capturing utility to make a copy that would run on a Mac. But our presentation would have been much better if we could have used YouTube Downloader for Mac, a new and free app released this week by FLVTO.

The downloader is far easier to use than any screen capturing software that I've seen. To save a video, users paste the URL it into an input field. The software converts the video (or audio) into a commonly-used format such as MP3, MP4, AVI, AAC, MOV, FLV, WMA or WMV.

The conversion takes a few seconds or a few minutes, depending on the size of the source material. Once the file is converted, it can be exported directly to iTunes.

In addition to YouTube, the program also works with content from SoundCloud, Vimeo and Dailymotion. It supports high-definition video and batch downloads of up to 99 items at a time.

YouTube Downloader for Mac is available for free at the FLVTO website.

By: Ric Manning On 4/04/2015

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Nektony's utility finds Mac file dupes

Spring is traditionally the time to clean out the dreck that you accumulated over the winter and get your life organized.

And that must be prime time at Nektony, where they specialize in cleanup utilities for Mac. Their Disk Expert scans and cleans hard drives while ClearDisk organizes your Mac startup disk.

Nektony's latest product is Duplicates Expert, a utility that finds files and folders that are duplicates or similar to one another, giving you the opportunity to weed out what you don't need.

After launch, the program presents a window when you can drop the folders or drives that you want to scan. The program works with both internal and external storage drives. The scan looks at documents, pictures, movies, music, archives and other file types.

It then presents a graph that identifies dupes and "almost-duplicate" files. You can sort files by name, date, number, size, age and total size, making it easy to decide which ones to keep and which need to go.

Mac users can download a free trial version of Duplicates Expert from the Nektony website or buy it for $1.99 in the Apple Mac App Store. Check out the demo in the video below.

By: Ric Manning On 3/06/2015

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Upgraded Disk Cleaner utility finds even more Mac junk

If you're a Mac user who likes to keep their hard drive clean and free of digital dreck, you probably know about Disk Cleaner. Maybe you read my report last month about this affordable Mac utility.

Power App's Disk Cleaner inspects a Mac hard drive or solid-state drive and finds that stuff that you don't need, like cache files, downloads, application logs and other leftovers.

After performing a scan, the program delivers a report showing what could and probably should be deleted. You can say yes and get a full clean-up or pick an choose what you want to keep and what to discard.

Power App recently upgraded the program to target more types of useless stuff. The latest version now examines your iTunes collection and more dark corners of your iOS operating system. It also finds and offers to delete old backup files from your iPhone.

You can read more about Disk Cleaner on Power App's website or buy a copy for $2.99 at the Apple iTunes Store.

By: Ric Manning On 12/14/2014

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Disk Cleaner for Macs finds and removes the junk

A person's desk can quickly become cluttered with the detritus of a busy person's work week. Memos, sticky notes, even leftover sandwich wrappers pile up because you're just too busy to clean up and reorganize.

If you could see the stuff on your computer's hard drive, you'd find just as much junk: cache files, downloads, application logs and an full trash can. And all of it is taking up valuable storage space that could be put to better use and sometimes causing your computer to work slower and less efficiently.

Disk Cleaner is a Mac utility that finds and removes all that stuff that you don't need, free your computer from litter and leftovers. Disk Cleaner scours hard drives and solid-state drives sorting out the apps and supporting files that you need and separating them from the odds and ends that you don't. After the scan, the program presents a report showing what and and should be deleted.

I ran Disk Cleaner on my little Macbook Air and it found almost 1 GB of stuff I didn't need. And, when you have only 120GB of storage, every gigabyte counts.

You can read more about Disk Cleaner on Power App's website or buy a copy for $2.99 at the Apple iTunes Store.

By: Ric Manning On 11/15/2014

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