Competition: Win a copy of Cram

Mac OS X Tips has teamed up with SimpleLeap Software to give away 3 free copies of Cram, their software for studying with flash cards and multiple choice tests. See the bottom of this post for details on how to enter the competition.

Cram is an application for creating and sharing flash cards and multiple choice tests to help you study. The interface is all very intuitive, and it comes with a few pre-made tests which are great for getting you started and showing you how everything works.

The two main ways to use Cram are to either create your own tests or to browse the tests in the online test portal.

Creating your own test is pretty straightforward. For each question you write, you can enter up to five possible possible answers to choose from. You can either manually choose these for each question, or you can create an "Answer Bank" that contains all the answers for every question in the test (and also some incorrect answers if you want) and then randomly assigns them as the multiple choice answers to each question.

Drag and drop adding of images and audio to your questions is also really simple, and you have the option of setting a time limit to your test.


Once you've created your test, clicking "Study" in the toolbar will allow you to view your questions as flash cards that you can flip over to see the answer. Then as soon as you are confident enough, you can start the test. Cram also keeps a detailed test history so you can track your progress and see if you are improving.

The Test Portal is the alternative to creating your own tests, and it's probably my favourite feature. It contains over 2000 tests on all sorts of subjects submitted by other users. Unfortunately most of them don't seem to be organised into the right categories, but the search feature works well enough to overcome this. Each test has a name and description, and once you've found what you want simply clicking download test will add it to your collection. Of course you can share your own created tests just as easily by selecting them and clicking "Share Test" in the toolbar.

Overall Cram looks like a great resource for students or anyone studying for a test where they have to memorise things. It seems particularly well suited to particular tasks like learning foreign language vocabulary or dates in history.

You can download a demo for free, and purchase the full version for $34.99.

Create double-clickable dvdmedia movie bundles

When you rip a DVD to your Mac you end up with a VIDEO_TS folder, which can be dragged to DVD player icon to play the DVD (you might find some stubborn DVDs will only play in VLC though).

As the DVD media is a folder, obviously you can't double-click it to open it in DVD Player. Instead you have to do the cumbersome open-the-app-then-drag-and-drop-to-icon procedure.

Video_TS to dvdmedia

The way around this is to rename the folder with the .dvdmedia extension. This will turn the folder into a bundle, and add a nice DVD icon as well. Double-clicking this will automatically open it up in DVD player, but you can easily change this to another app like VLC for example. The easiest way is to choose Get Info on the bundle, choose the new app from the "Open with" section, and click the "Change All..." button. While you are in the Get Info window you might also want to click “Hide Extension” and rename the bundle to the name of the movie. You can also change the icon to the artwork for the movie which you can get from a site like Get Video Artwork.

One annoying side effect of this is that Front Row won't recognise dvdmedia bundles, whereas it will recognise VIDEO_TS folders. Of course, to get your movies to work well in the Finder, Quicktime iTunes, Front Row and iPhone all at the same time you might prefer to run them through a tool like HandBrake. This can also save you some space depending on how you encode them.

If you want to win a copy of Cram, a great application for studying and testing, there is still time to enter our competition.

Screen Capture Tools: 40+ Free Tools and Techniques

Screen capture, or print screen is perhaps the most efficient way to share whatever appears on your desktop. They help tech users like us to share and communicate better with friends and peers. Major operating systems today comes with basic screen capture and print screen function, but if these can’t fulfill what you need from a screen capture then you are probably looking for a screen capturing tool.

Screen capturing tools do what the basic tool don’t. What these tools could do varies, including the ability to include sketches and text, instantly upload image online, audio capturing, dimension-specific capturing and more. Make your screen capture and sharing experience more interesting, here’s a showcase of 40+ Free Screen Capturing Tools and Related Techniques. Full list after jump.

Cross Platform

We love cross platform tools. No more worries when you are all too familiar with one tool and needs to get the job done on a different operating system.

• Jing Project

  A project of Techsmith, Jing has the ability to do instance image and video capturing. Aside from that, you can also do sketches on the image and share them online. Speaking from functionality point of view, being free tool is definetely a steal. [Download: Windows, Mac]

  

• Evernote

  Saying Evernote has cross platform supporting ability seems to be slightly inaccurate, instead it’s multi-platform. This awesome tool not only runs on Windows and Mac, it also supports iPhone, Windows Mobile and even websites. You’ve got to check out the video to see how great it is. [Download: Windows, Mac, more]

  

• WebKut

  Capture web pages in whole or parts. And because it’s developed with Adobe AIR, you bet it’s cross-platform. It captures web screenshots, the only problem is – it’s not attached to the browser. [Download]

  

• Websnapshot

  Yet another Adobe AIR application to take website snap shots. [Downloads]

  

Windows Only

By default, you can only do a full page and active window print screen on Windows. The following tools give you much more flexibility.

• ZScreen

  Open-source screen capture program that allows for region/window/full-screen screenshots. It can FTP screenshots and put the URL in your clipboard in a single keystroke. It supports automatic custom naming conventions with variables. [Download]

  

• Screenshot Captor

  Behave like most screen capture software. The most interesting part is – you can run it from a USB thumbdrive. Talking about print screen portability. [Download]

• Cropper

  Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C# on the Microsoft .Net platform. [Download]

• Capture

  Capture is a quick-and-easy screen capture utility for Windows (and NT), which allows you to capture the entire screen, at any color depth and resolution, and save it into a Bitmap file for editing. [Download]

• MWSnap

  Small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen. [Download]

  

• ScreenPrint32

  Free windows tool to print and/or capture to disk or clipboard, the full desktop, active window, predefined area, or user selected area of the screen. [Download]

• Snippy

  Useful free tool to copy webpage screenshot for sharing purposes. Interesting thing is that, when you cutting out a portion of an Internet Explorer window, the URL will also be copied to the clipboard; this makes it very convenient to select something interesting on a Web site and send it out in an email message. [Download]

• SWBCapture

  Screen capture utility that allows you to quickly and easily capture an image of any window on your desktop, or the entire desktop. [Download]

• Screen Grab Pro

  Screen Grab Pro features one-click grab of any screen for ease of use, Timer operation, Current window selection list and more. [Download]

  

• Wisdom-Soft ScreenHunter

  Wisdom-Soft ScreenHunter is a free screen-capture tool for you to easily take screenshots. ScreenHunter can capture a full screen, an active window, the client window, or a rectangular area. [Download]

• Gadwin PrintScreen

  Capture screenshots with ease. [Download]

  

• FastStone Capture

  Light and powerful screen capture application with whole screen, object-selective and region screencapture ability. Save files in various formats, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF and PDF. [Download]

  

Mac Only

Here are some of the most commonly used screen capturing tools for the Mac enthusiast.

• Capture Me

  Flexible screen capture and recording utility for Mac OS X which features a floating capture window, several saving options, and resize ability. [Download]

  

• Backdrop

  Simple utility to fill your screen with a giant blank window. Fill the window with a solid color or a custom image, your choice so you can take clean nice printscreen. [Download]

  

• Skitch

  Skitch is not solely a screen capture tool. It allows you to capture screen shots of any application, chat moments and the ability to sketch on the screen shots. You can then upload it to share with friends. A printscreen tool injected with some fun. [Download]

  

• InstantShot!

  InstantShot! offers classical screenshot functionality for capturing the whole screen, a portion of it or a window and also the option to make timed screenshots or to make delayed captures over time. It offers a wide range of preferences and options to fit everyone’s needs. [Download]

  

• Paparazzi!

  Written in Objective-C and the WebKit framework, this small utility is suitable for those who wants to do simple screen shots in their Mac. [Download]

  

• Screenshot Helper

  Screenshot Helper shows a full screen window with a solid color or a desktop picture so that you can take clean screenshots without having irrelevant windows and desktop icons in the background. [Download]

  

• SnapNDrag

  SnapNDrag lets you take a screenshot by just clicking a button and dragging the resulting screenshot off, perhaps one of the simplest and easiet to use Mac printscreen tool we’ve seen. [Download]

  

• About Timed Screenshot 1.1

  A light screen capturing tool that runs in background until you kill the process (in Terminal) or logout. [Download]

• Copernicus

  Mac application for speed screenshot taking and video capturing (no audio). It’s also a virtual photo gallery. [Download]

  

Linux

Screen capturing tools for Linux users.

• XscreenCapture

  XscreenCapture allows you to capture an X11 dump from any Linux client with X11 port open. It will also convert and save automatically the result picture in the desidered compress format (default PNG). [Download]

• Xvidcap

  Screen capture enabling you to capture videos off your X-Window desktop for illustration or documentation purposes. [Download]

Web Tools

These web tools go beyond screen capturing of your desktop. It allows you to print screen any website, all the way from header to footer.

• Browsershot

  Free web service that shows you how your website looks like in different browser of different version. A must tool for web developers on a browser compatibility check.

  

• ScreenShots.jp

  Similar to Browsershots, this free web services is for those who understand Japanese.

  

• Super Screenshot

  Simple web service for those who wants quick print screens. No compatibility check of different browser or versions available.

• Clip2Net

  Clip2Net allows you to capture, sketch and share screencaptures online instantly. Good tool to communicate ideas with peers. [Download]

  

• Websnapr

  As the name suggest, it snaps thumbnail screenshot of any webites. All you need to do is enter the URL and hit capture. Comes with plugins you to facilitate blogging and web publishing.

• Thumbalizr

  Yet another online web thumbnail generator. Comes with API.

• Browsrcamp

  Test the compatibility of your design with Mac OS X browsers. Free web screenshot tool build on Mac OSX Leopard.

Firefox Plugins

Screen capturing plugin for Firefox browser. They prints the lower fold screens you don’t see.

• Screengrab!

  Firefox plugin with the ability to printscreen entire upper-fold and lower-fold of any browsing websites. Instead of saving the screenshot to a file, you can copy it to clipboard. [Install]

• FireShot

  Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages. Comes with sets of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Somehow it’s nota available for Firefox on Mac OSX [Install]

  

Top 100 Essential Mac Applications

Computer Files

This section is all about programs that can be used to work with files and applications

1) AppFresh
Software updater is great for Apple applications, but appfresh has the ability to check thrid party apps for updates. A great little tool for keeping upto date.

2) AppZapper
Although applications are easy to uninstall on a mac there are usually small preference files hanging about. Appzapper cleans up an uninstall all of those files.

3) Disk Inventory X
A simple program that scans your disk and visually shows what files takes up how much space, good to visualize if you are running out of space and you have some size hogs.

4) Grand Perspective
Very similar to Disk Inventory X, shows you what files take up how much space on your website.

5) OpenPlist

A very cool little tool if you need to end up editing Plist files.

6) Quicksilver
One of the best applications ever made for the mac. Its a quick launch tool that enables you to open and do practically anything. Very fun and really increases your productivity.

7) Stuffit
An application design to unstuff or unpack nearly any file. Create if you use archives a lot.

8) TextWrangler
A very cool text editor that lets you edit text files quickly. Sometimes more powerful than text edit.

9) TidyUp
An application that enables you to search through a list of files finds duplicates. Great if you have many files and you need to organise them.

10) Todos
Leaves no application behind. A very visual way to view all of the applications on your computer. Kind of surpassed by the stacks in the dock.

11) UnRarX
UnrarX gives you the abilty to easily uncompress .rar files. Very good, although stuffit can now handle .rar files.

12) Xslimmer
Give your mac a diet. It goes through and removes the powerpc or intel parts of your program. It can really reduce the size of applications. Can also break them if you are not careful.

Internet

This section is all about applications that use the internet or this type of connectivity in some way.

13) Adium
A simple all in one AIM, chat client. Supports, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and many other through the use of plugins and basic support. It does lack some functionality in some chat protocols.

14) ApGrapher
A great little program that offers the ability to find information about the wireless networks whizzing around your head.

15) Azureus
One of the best bittorrent clients out there. Has lots of user extensions through the use of plugins.

16) Colloquy
A really powerful application that can be used for the IRC networks. Special care has been taken in this application to make it blend in with the rest of the Mac OS theming.

17) CSSedit
A must for any web developer. CSSedit offers the best tools around to help you edit and modify CSS code for you webpages.

18) Cyberduck
A small lightweight application for ftp. Has some small niggles, but it is free. Transmit is better if you use ftp a lot.

19) Firefox
One of the best web browsers around in my opinion. Has a massive add-on library which you can customize to your needs. A viable alternative to safari.

20) iStumber
I found this a great small application that enabled you to view wireless and bluetooth networks quick and hassle free.

21) LittleSnitch
The application that snitches on any application that is trying to access the net to phone home. Great for protecting you privacy.

22) Netnewswire
A very popular RSS client for the mac, nuff said.

23) Skype
Offering superior calls over the internet, it is the application if you do a lot of talking and want a good quality transmission.

24) Transmission
A light weight bittorrent application that is gaining popularity. Its personal choice at this point of transmission verse Azureus.

25) Transmit
A great application from Panic that will feature a couple of time in this list. It is a powerful application for ftp uploads and downloads.

26) Undercover
A piece of software that dials to the undercover servers if you computer has been stolen. Great if you use a laptop, less useful on a desktop.

27) Unison
Another piece of panic software that enables you to use the usenet newsreader networks. A really good piece of software if you use usenet a lot.

28) Vidalia
A GUI controller for the Tor anonymity network. One click on, one click off, simple and easy to use. Best of all its free.

Multimedia

This section is all about video, images and sound. Anything of this nature is included here.

29) VLC
The all in one application for watching videos. Supports nearly every codec imaginable.

30) Aperture
One of Apples Pro programs for organizing and altering photos. A very powerfull application although comes with a bit of a price tag.

31) Audacity
A free audio editor which has a few advance features that make it create for editing audio for your videos or other applications.

32) Blender
A free 3D modeler which has the same power of many of the most advance applications on the market. Comes with quite a steep learning curve.

33) Delicious Library
A very cool application used to organise your books, movies, games and CD’s. You can use your built in iSight to save time by scanning your books. Very cool and fun to use.

34) DeskLickr
A simple application that uses the vast photo resource of flickr to change your wallpaper every so often. Makes a cool change.

35) Desktastic
Anoter Panic app. This time it can be used to write directly on your desktop. Very cool if you use a tablet for your daily work.

36) Gimp
The free image editing program. Used by many open source and linux users. A create start since Leopard doesn’t include any image editing software.

37) Google Earth
One of the best applications from Google. Use it to zoom in on planet earth and explore the world around you. A great time waster, as well as a very useful tool if you are going anywhere and want to check out the surroundings.

38) HandBreak
An open source application that can quickly convert DVD’s to Mpeg-4.

39) iLife
The all in one package made by Apple. I don’t think this needs any explaining.

40) iShowU
This application takes a direct recording of your screen. Great if you want to make recordings of specific applications. You need a good CPU, a bit of a power hog.

41) Joost
A very hot application that lets you watch free TV. Beautiful application even though the amount of TV stations are a bit small.

42) Photoshop
The high priced application for real pros who want to edit and manipulate images and photos. Not for people with tight wallets.

43) Pixelmator
The medium priced application that has a lot of great image editing potential. Not as expenisive as Photoshop.

44) Shapeshifter
Bored of your interface? Let shape shifter change it for you. Not Leopard compatitble although this is likely to change.

45) Theme Park
A great little app which lets you delve into the resource files for applications and lets you change them. Not as powerful as Shapeshifter but lets you tweak little bits of your operating systems interface.

46) TVShows
A little app that downloads all of the torrent files for your favourite TV shows. You need a bittorrent client to finish the process off.

47) Wallsaver
Puts your screensaver as your wallpaper. Add a bit of life to your desktop.

Little Apps

Little Applications are small applications in size that add a bit of functionality or are just plain cool.

48) Autorate
A simple piece of software that rates your musis in your iTunes libary based on the number of plays and track skips.

49) Fish
A simple little program that shows you little fishes swimming around.

50) iAlertU
A little program that can arm your computer. Moving your laptop will set of the alarm and alert you to intruders.

51) Liquidmac
Once again using the motion sensor in a laptop. This program fills the screen with water which you can play around with by moving your computer.

52) MacSaber
Let your Mac become a jedi. Once again using the motion sensor makes cool lightsaber noises. Don’t let the mac fly out of your hands as it has with a couple of people.

53) Quinn
Tetris on the extreme side of life. A cool little app with amazing graphics on the old arcade favourite Tetris.

54) Resize ‘Em All
A little program which can be used to resize images.

55) Rulers
Put a ruler on your screen. This application lets you measure nearly anything on your screen, great if you are in the design world.

56) smcFanControl
A small application that runs in your menu bar to control your fan speeds. A must if you think your computer runs a bit hot.

57) TimeOut
One for the work-a-holic. A little application that tells you to take a break and stop what you are doing.

58) Wallsaver
Sets your screen saver as your wallpaper. A great little program to add a bit of movement to your desktop.

Tools

This section of essential applications is all about tools. These are tools to do specific task or just to give you information.

59) Apple Remote Desktop
One of Apples many programs that lets you work effectively on your network. This app lets you look in on a remote desktop and work with it remotely.

60) Battery Health
One of many tools used to help you find out how much juice is left in your Mac battery. A tool for any laptop.

61) BootCamp
Installing Windows on a Mac is never easier with BootCamp. A simple program that create a partition on you disk for installing windows.

62) BwanaDik
A menu bar monitoring tool for you network. Lets you find tons of info about you LAN and WAN in one easy to reach place.

63) Carbon Copy Cloner
For serious back ups you need somthing like Carbon Copy Cloner that can clone your entire drive quickly and easily.

64) Chmox
Chmox is a program that enables you to open .chm help files on your Mac. Chm files are not supported in preview.

65) Coconut Battery
A personal favourite of mine, this is another battery tool to monitor the health of your battery. I wish my laptop was run off coconuts.

66) DasBoot
DasBoot is a tool to create a diagnostic and repair kit for your computer to put on an iPod or flash drive.

67) Flip4Mac
The tool endorsed by Microsoft to help with those pesky .wmv files.

68) FreeDMG
This software creates drag and drop .dmg archives on the fly. Easy to use if you make a lot of disk images.

69) GeekTool
GeekTool is a preference pane module to show system logs, unix commands output, or images (i.e. from the internet) on your desktop.

70) Growl
A very useful tool that is used by many applications to show a clean way of displaying messages to you. Like the bubbles in Windows except a hell of a lot better.

71) Hardware Monitor
Hardware Monitor is designed to check the various pieces of hardware on you computer for faults and problems as well as give messages back to you.

72) Hex Fiend

Editing hex files cannot be easier with Hex Fiend.

73) HoudahGeo
HoudahGeo allows you to add Geo data to any image within the EXIF data. Helps you find your way around the world in your images.

74) iStat Menus
iStat Menus off a wide range of statistical analysis of your computer including various hardware bits. Their widget is one of my favouites.

75) Mac Pilot
This piece of software allows you to modify various parts of your computer that you would normally have to do through Terminal.

76) MacJanitor
This little app cleans up various system files and other bits and bobs to keep your computer running smoothly.

77) MainMenu
MainMenu is another piece of software to help you keep your computer running smoothly. This one has more advance options such as rebuilding the spotlight database.

78) MenuMeters
Another monitor piece of software but this one is designed to run within the menu bar.

79) Monolingual
Who needs to know French. Monolingual removes the languages from the computer that you do not need.

80) Operation
A project management tool that lets you organise your projects quickly and easily.

81) Parallels
Highly recommended virtualization software for virtualizing other OS’s.

82) Service Scrubber
Helps you organise and remove services from your menus (Name of App > Services)

83) SquidDan
Once a very popular proxy tool for sorting out your own proxy for handling your internet connection. Has become disused over time.

84) Stomp
Stomp those big files down to size. Helps reduce video files into more compressed formats.

85) SuperDuper
Another great backing up utility although its not fully Leopard compatible at the time of writing.

86) Synergy2
A very cool little application that lets you share a mouse and keyboard between one or more computers.

87) TinkerTool
A tool that lets you access more preferences the Apple has built into the OS.

88) VMWare
Another very good piece virtualization software to enable to to virtualize other OS’s.

Work

This final section ,and to round up, is going to be all about top programs for use at work.

89) Cha-Ching
A simple money program that helps you organise your accounts, budgets and finances.

90) Concept Draw
More of a group of programs that offer a wide range of applications such as flow charts to mind maps.

91) Filemaker
A cross platform database application, that has amazing power and potential.

92) iWork
Apples work application package to complement iLife, a good package if you want the Apple integration although lacks on some features.

93) Microsoft Office
Office is one of the most prominent packages on the Windows machines for work programs. Very good on Mac, although some small annoying bugs.

94) Money2
Another application for managing your accounts. The interface on this program is amazing.

95) Neooffice
An Open Office port to Mac, like Microsoft Office, except its free.

96) Nvu
A very powerful webpage editor for designing and creating websites. Just as good as Dreamweaver.

97) Omnigraffle
A brill program that offers a really cool way of creating presentation diagrams. Check out the Omni Groups offerings for all of the cool programs they have to offer.

98) Process
Another program by Jumsoft on this list that lets you plan and organise your projects.

99) Quicken
Another personal finance program, but this one feels more corporate and official.

100) Yojimbo
A cool little program that helps you organise all your bits of information, great if you end up filling up dashboard with millions of stickies.