While trying to find information about Quicksilver's new Constellation (radial) menus, I ran across this amazing-sounding utility. Can't wait to try it out!

Update.... WikityWidget is a great start, but lacks some critical features to make it more than a curiosity. Primary problems for me are:

1. You can only use camelcase for links.
2. There are no formatting options. The widget can't parse HTML, and some standard wiki structured text syntax common on other systems don't work either.
3. There's no back button, and no navigation options other than seeing all wikits at once.

Still, it's a pretty amazing free widget! Definitely worth a download to check it out.

Gee, I hate to pay money for an uninstaller, and I really don't need one, given the way most Mac apps are installed. But still... I can't resist trying it out.

Update 4/3/06: I haven't had time to try this out yet, but I noticed in Macworld today that the software has a new component called QuickZap that apparently makes it even easier to delete peripheral pieces of an app that live in the Library (widgets, pref panes, etc.)

Update 4/17/06: OK, I just couldn't resist the temptation any longer... Although there are many apps that are higher up in the "review queue" than AppZapper, I just love this one's logo and website design. (Aren't those good reasons?) Also, the company released a new version, so I was downloading it anyway.

All I can say to you is... Go get this software! After only about 5 minutes of use, I could tell it was going to save me hours of time (assuming I ever really get around to doing the cleanup of my preferences and application support folders that I know they need). Having used up my 5 free Zaps, I went ahead and purchased the damn thing. Speaking of purchasing it, you might be able to save a few dollars by googling for "AppZapper coupon" before plunking down the "retail price" of $12.95...

So what got me so excited about AppZapper besides the website and logo? OK, in a nutshell, here's what AppZapper lets you do that you can't reall do any other way:

• In the blink of an eye, find all the files that were installed by a given application, as well as the .dmg file that it came in.
• Each file or folder is neatly displayed in the Zapper window, with checkboxes indicating which ones you want to zap. You can uncheck items you don't want zapped (for example, I actually want to keep the old executable files, just not the preference and application support files), and there are shortcut methods for selecting and deselecting different categories of these files.

• All you do is drag applications and folders of apps to the Zapper window, and the magic begins. I haven't tested the full limits of this (the folder of old apps I want to zap contains... let's see... about 150 applications), but I've put up to 10 apps in front of AppZapper at a time, and it didn't flinch.
• AppZapper keeps a detailed log of all the files it has zapped, and you can go through the Trash later if you find you threw something out that you shouldn't have.
• True to my earlier comment about an AppZapper upgrade, the Zap window has a little tool that lets you peruse your Widgets, Preference Panes, and Plugins folders for apps to zap. Only thing missing there are things like Input Managers and Services, but I'm sure that'll come eventually.
• If you're really nervous about zapping certain sacred apps, you can drag them to a special "protected" pane, and AppZapper won't harm them. You can also make sure AppZapper doesn't mess with any currently running applications.

Before AppZapper, I would brave a stroll into my /Library/Preferences folder now and then, individually selecting plist files to destroy. Same thing with the /Library/Application Support folder. But I never ventured far, because I'd have to try to verify what apps I was affecting, and that took time. Plus, the stroll itself was very slow. Even after spending a half hour or hour on this, I might have cleaned out only a dozen or so files and had no way of knowing if there were any other associated files lurking about.

The way I work, I keep all my old, unused apps and demo apps in a special folder on another partition. It's easy to drag the apps themselves out of the startup volume, but doing so--as everyone who's thought about this much knows--doesn't drag any of the flotsam and jetsam with it. AppZapper is perfect for finding all that old garbage and provides just the right amount of protection to make sure you don't destroy something important in the process.

Maybe someday Apple will offer something like AppZapper with the OS, but until then, do yourself a favor: Reduce the size of your Application Support and Preferences folders. I can't help but think smaller folders will let the apps you actually use launch a little faster. OK, not by much maybe, but scanning through a folder with 100 plist files has got to be faster than scanning through one with 500 files. :-)

Originally downloaded 1/24/06. This software has a lot of good reviews and looks like it has more power than CSSEdit.

Update 10/6/06. My comment from late January turns out to have been a major understatement. Style Master makes CSSEdit look like a toy, to be honest. It has so much power and so many functions that its interface struggles to retain the simple intuitive grace that Mac OS X software is famous for. And I have to say that it does succeed. Although it takes longer to get to know than a simpler tool like CSSEdit, the study is rewarded with the kind of power that will carry you through the toughest style sheet tests.

Style Master pitches itself as the right tool no matter what your skill level with CSS, and I suspect that may be true. Being myself way past the beginner stage, it's hard to evaluate it from that perspective. However, certainly Style Master has a plethora of "wizards"—as well as tutorials, references, and other resources—that would be great for getting you started on a CSS-based website. There are entire website templates as well—all using CSS instead of HTML, of course—as well as starter kits for blogs based on WordPress, Movable Type, and Blogger. Specific wizards walk you through setting up basic style sheets, page-layout style sheets, and stylesheets for page components like breadcrumbs and tabbed navigation.

The company that makes Style Master, Westciv, appears to have only one line of business—CSS. That line has two components: One focuses on training courses (which are available for sale), and the other focuses on Style Master (the tool component). As such, making CSS accessible to beginners is an important facet of what Style Master tries to accomplish.

Still, they understand that there are by now many designers and programmers who have intermediate and advanced CSS skills, and Style Master is chock full of goodies for them as well. Need to see the generated CSS for a given website? No problem—You can load the site into Style Master and have a look. The "Get Info" function, always available for any selected CSS statement or page component, has four tabsfull of info:

1. Info: This pane shows syntax and usage information.
2. Compatibility: What browsers support this element/attribute/function?
3. Style: This is where the computed style shows up. StyleMaster shows you the value of every CSS property that's set for the selected element.
4. HTML: Here, you can peruse the HTML source code for the selection.

Style Master amazed me in several ways as I tested it out. I'm not going to go through a comprehensive look at all the interface features... just at the ones that impressed me the most. To start with, I learned how Style Master can import a style sheet from any website... pretty essential if you want to jump in and work with the CSS code for an existing website. I did have to refer to the documentation to learn how to do this. By default, Style Master can import web pages from your hard drive, but by setting up a website in your "Preview Options" pane, it will load any URL, thereafter displaying the style sheet it reads.

One of the first power features I was impressed with was the way Style Master can format your style sheet rules. Even if it imports a scrunched, optimized set of styles (as it did with mine), you can select Edit/Format Style Sheet, and Style Master will reformat the rules so they're readable, using formatting you define in the Preferences window. This was marvelous, but what really did it for me was the realization that StyleMaster has the ability to always upload an optimized version to the website. This lets you work with a human-readable version in StyleMaster, but let the browser read a much smaller version when it downloads your web pages.

Another power feature I know I'm going to enjoy is Style Master's ability to identify "orphan" rules. How many people besides me learned CSS by adding rules until something worked the way we wanted? Given browser differences and general CSS quirks, quite often the rules just wouldn't work the way they were supposed to... so you might leave a declaration in place whether it was needed or not. This kind of behavior can really lead to style-sheet bloat, and Style Master's ability to sniff out unused rules should help shrink that back.

After I'd played with the software for awhile, I discovered a very useful option in the "Statements List" drawer, which you can optionally display on the left-hand side of the StyleMaster window. By default, this drawer lists all the CSS statements defined in a given style sheet. (The order of display is configurable.) However, when you have a style sheet as big as the one for Musings from Mars, that becomes a very long, scrolling list. Fortunately, Style Master will jump to or highlight statements that are contextually relevant when you select something in the preview pane. But even better, you can toggle a setting in the drawer's "gear" menu that tells Style Master to only show statements relevant to your current selection. This is a very powerful way of filtering that list into a usable length.

Working with Style Master is like watching a really talented dancer. Everything is done in a smooth, coordinated fashion, and with a grace that delights and satisfies. Select an element in the stylesheet code view, and Style Master will also select the relevant CSS statement from the Statements list. If you have Style Master's handy visual CSS-builder tool open, it will automatically switch to show the right pane and display the selected values. Meanwhile, if you have the "smart" preview pane open, Style Master will highlight the HTML element that's using the rule you selected. The same thing happens if you select an HTML element in the preview pane or a CSS statement from the Statements list. Given all this coordinated action, it's really quite hard to get lost. :-)

A couple of other features that will keep me using Style Master are its good FTP support, so you can download and upload files from within Style Master, and its ability to create CSS statements from selected HTML. This latter feature requires a bit of an explanation. Basically, it means that you can import an HTML page that has no style sheet and ask Style Master to create one based on the formatting it finds. Is that cool, or what? You can do this on a micro level also... that is, select a portion of an HTML document, and you'll find a contextual command in Style Master to make "New Statements from HTML."

Style Master will continue to surprise me, I think, as I get to know it better. And I'm convinced I'll have to fork over the dough to get it, too! At $60, it's quite a bit more than the $25 CSSEdit (which I bought last year), but I expect I'll be relying on it quite a bit more than I rely on CSSEdit these days. I expect I'll still find the need to call upon the marvelous XyleScope now and then, but I may not need it quite so often.

Version as tested: 4.5.

I haven't used this great little system monitoring toolset in a while, since my menubar got so full with other things, but with my new 23" monitor (*grin*) it may be time to try again.

Wow! It's much improved over the earlier version I'd installed, which was at least a year ago. The main improvement is the visual control you've now got over the various charts. Whereas before, MenuMeters was pretty skanky, appearance-wise, it's now almost beautiful! Beautiful and functional is a win! Especially when combined with free. MenuMeters has a plethora of options, which you manipulate in its handy preference pane.

I tried an earlier version of this unique software and was very impressed. It was still too rough for daily use, but these guys have got some great ideas on ways to improve spotlight. This is a new version, and I'll be checking it out.

Update 4/3/06: OK, it's now official! Although MoRU still crashes too often, I found I couldn't live without it when my 30-day trial ended recently. So, I went ahead and forked over $10 to this developer.

MoRU is a seriously cool addition to Spotlight, and far better than anything else I've tried as far as quickly locating files with specific characteristics. MoRU specializes in showing you the most recent files that fit those characteristics, so that attribute comes by default. But MoRU gives you an excellent interface to all of the other thousand things Spotlight can do, which Apple's in-Finder Spotlight search (via saved folders) only hints at.

Like the Finder, MoRU lets you define "Smart Groups", which you can arrange in the sidebar of MoRU's two-column interface. It comes with about a dozen of these already set up--things like

• Applications last opened
• Files modified in the last week
• Photoshop images (last modified)

I've added a few that I use regularly, such as "Latest downloads" and "Old preference files." The task I used it for over the weekend was to compare the contents of my local iDisk with the iDisk at .mac. MoRU can do this easily... by selecting all the files organized by date on one iDisk, and the same on the other. It's easy to eyeball these, and MoRU lets you drag and drop files from its pane into the correct folder without going to Finder. It also has good contextual menus for this kind of thing.

One of its coolest tricks is the ability to extract metadata from samples files. For example, if you want to restrict your search to a certain kind of file that by some small chance doesn't appear in MoRU's choices, you can browse to an example file and ask MoRU to extract the metadata.

Time doesn't permit me to discuss MoRU at the length it deserves, but do yourself a favor and give it a try. It's now an official member of my personal software inventory! MoRU's 30-day trial is nag-free and has no limitations whatsoever.

Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") introduced several new ways for end-users to get delightful, free software from creative developers having fun with the new back-end toys: Dashboard, Automator, and Spotlight. A few intrepid developers have tried to make money from these technologies, but so far, not very much. This set of Automator additions look promising, and certainly the company's Automator-Actions website does a great job of explaining their value. Since I love Automator more each time I use it, I'll have to find out if this set is worth $19.95.

OK... after reading the documentation, downloading and installing the actions, and looking through the example workflows, I'm impressed. Though I haven't yet tried to build anything, I forked over $19.95 because of the sheer beauty of this product... well engineered, great documentation, great setup. A real value add for Automator. I'm sure I'll get around to trying it soon!

Originally downloaded 2/7/06. This software has been getting a lot of notice among Mac gurus, and it'll get a run-through here at Musings soon.

Update 12/10/06. I just tried Process out (at last), and was very impressed. I'll be adding some notes and pros/cons in a day or two.

Update 12/12/06. You can read the details on Process in my article "Getting Organized and Planning Projects: Another Rich Vein of Mac OS X Software". A quick summary might read, "Process is an excellent start and has a lot to offer. As long as the developer continues pushing it in the same direction, I'd recommend Process without hesitation. However, in the current version, there are a few missing pieces that would keep me from using it myself." I do plan to keep an eye on Process as new releases come out.

Version as tested: 2.0.2.

This freeware from Monkeybread Software does one thing and does it well... drop a file on its icon, and it'll make a JPEG 2000 version and put it in the same folder as the original. It's going in my toolbox!

MBBench is freeware for measuring your disks' speeds, as well as the speed of your CD/DVD writer. Does a good job of this, and has an interesting interface. Freeware is good!

Originally downloaded 12/23/05. These guys have a libsyn site for their Twisted TV series... this is a free tool that presumably they use to make their animations podcast-ready.

Update 10/4/06. Turns out this freeware is an Automator application, for which you also get the workflow file in your download. And it does precisely what it says it will, and very efficiently, too! You don't have to use this just with comics, either... Basically, the application prompts you to select a bunch of images from your file system. It then resizes them and pulls them together in QuickTime as a slideshow, saved in a format that works just right as a podcast for your video iPod. The action gives you some control over the slideshow settings during setup. My only gripe is that the application didn't clean up after itself... it left all the down-sized images on my desktop. I'm not sure when or if I'll have a need for this, but it's a great example of what you can build with Automator, and the workflow itself will be a useful learning tool.

Version as tested: 1.0.

Originally downloaded 12/22/05. iSquint is one of several video-to-iPod video tools that have sprung up in the wake of the vPod. This one's free... iSquint claims to convert to iPod video "...many times faster than QuickTime Pro."

Update 8/03/06. The developers of iSquint now have a commercial product called VisualHub that takes video conversion to another level (one worth paying for, presumably).

Update 12/19/06. If you don't want to pay anything but want a quick, easy, and reliable tool to convert video for your iPod, you can't go wrong with iSquint. Sure, the developer wants you to upgrade to VisualHub (and isn't shy about letting you know!), but the fact is that he continues to enhance iSquint and keep it up to date. For example, iSquint was last upgraded in October to version 1.5, which adds support for the new 640x480 iPod resolution for h264 video, and you can also now convert Flash 8 videos to play on your iPod! Here's a developer who understands that goodwill generated through a great, free product like iSquint will develop into new customers for the upgraded product. :-)

Version as tested: 1.5.

Originally downloaded 12/11/05. Thanks to Peter Maurer and Rob Griffiths (of MacOSX Hints), services fans now have an easy way to customize the services listing. This easy-to-use utility is a must for any Mac user who likes to take full advantage of Mac OS X's interapplication services---which are one of the best kept secrets of Mac power users. The only downside to Service Scrubber is that you must remember to be patient when it's first loading. It can take a few minutes if you have lots and lots of services activated.

Version as tested: 1.1.3.

Originally downloaded 12/10/06. OK... after fleeing from Bloglines in search of something better, I downloaded and installed about a dozen Mac OS X RSS readers, and I set up profiles on about the same number of other web-based news aggregating sites. Pulp Fiction is the only tool that had a combination of all the features I wanted, and I've been very pleased with my (rather unconventional) choice.

Update 9/24/06. One of these days, I'll get around to posting the spreadsheet I prepared showing the criteria and how each tool fared... back in December 2005. Nothing stays the same, and I'm sure the RSS reader market is different today. Unfortunately, the software company that made PulpFiction---FreshlySqueezed---has been inactive in 2006, and PulpFiction has seen no updates at all. Not that it's suffered from that, but it's a little bit worrisome.

Version as tested: 1.2.2.

Originally downloaded 12/28/05. With a new free "light" version out, it's time to take a second look at this Applescript utility, which supposedly improves on Apple's script menu, among other things.

Update 1/31/06. Using FastScripts Lite is a no-brainer... it's free, and adds significant value to Apple's built-in Script menu. Most significantly, FastScripts Lite avoids switching contexts unnecessarily when running an AppleScript---that is, you can run scripts without being yanked from your current application, as long as there's no functional need for that. Almost as significant, FastScripts Lite lets you attach keyboard shortcuts to any Applescript on your system. You're limited to 10 shortcuts with the Lite version, but that may be enough for most people. The menu has a couple of other enhancements... for example, it puts the scripts for your current application at the top of the menu rather than at the bottom (as Apple's menu does). There's more, but the real choice is whether to upgrade to the $15 full version, which has even more bells and whistles.

Version as tested: 2.3.

Excellent, simple freeware for managing and testing your Webkit-browser cookies. New version just released. Unfortunately, it still has no icon of its own. :-)