InsomniaX for Mac Disables Sleep On Idle Or Lid Close While On Battery Or AC

InsomniaX is a free Mac app that not only lets you disable Mac’s idle sleep function, but also lets you stop your MacBook from entering sleep mode when you close the lid. The app lets you define these settings based on the power source, i.e., if the MacBook is running on battery, you may choose to allow it to enter sleep mode when the lid closes or the system is idle, and disable this behavior when it is plugged in.

Once installed, the app adds a dark crescent button to the Menu Bar. From the app’s Menu Bar icon, you can quickly choose to enable or disable sleep on lid close or if idle. You can also put the system to sleep immediately by selecting Sleep Display. To stop the system from entering sleep when the lid closes, selectDisable Lid Sleep. To restore the functionality, visit the same menu and select Enable Lid Sleep. Follow suit to disable sleeping on system idle.

The app’s preferences, which can be found within the app’s Menu Bar options, allow you to choose if the system should sleep when the lid is closed if it is on battery or plugged in. Go to Preferences > Disable Lid Sleep on…> Battery or Preferences > Disable Lid Sleep on…> AC. Similar options exist to customize the “sleep if idle” behavior.

The app has an additional feature called CPU Safety, which, if enabled, will put your MacBook to sleep if the CPU core temperature reaches or exceeds 90 degrees. You can have the app remember your preferences by selecting Save states on exit, and enable it to start when you login to your system.

The app is useful mostly if  you want to disable the lid from putting your MacBook to sleep. If you only want to stop your system from going to sleep if it is idle, you can do so from System Preferences > Energy Saver.

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Ambientweet :An Hotkey-Controlled Twitter Client For Mac

 Ambientweet is one such minimalistic Twitter client for Mac that works almost entirely with keyboard shortcuts. It displays one tweet at a time as a notification on your desktop, and cycles through the ones you’ve received. There are buttons for quickly retweeting, replying, favoriting or posting a tweet, but for going through a particular user’s tweets or scrolling through the ones in your feed, you will have to use keyboard shortcuts.

Launch the app and sign in to your Twitter account. The app will remember your login details for future, and you will not have to sign in over and over. You can switch to a different account at any time, as well.

Once signed in, the app will fetch the tweets in your feed and display them in a window at the center of the screen, which you can drag anywhere for repositioning. Hover your mouse over the window, and you will see controls for favoriting, replying to or retweeting an item, along with the option to post a new tweet. To manually move through your feed, use the Command+[ and Command+] shortcuts.

Other shortcuts include Command+R to reply to a tweet, Command+D to favorite it, Command+N to post a new tweet and Shift+Command+U to view all Tweets by a particular user.

The app shows only one tweet at a time, and has no column-like viewer. You will need to use the aforementioned shortcuts to move through them. The tweet window, by default,, stays on top of all other windows, but you can disable this behavior from the app’s preferences. Additionally, you can chose how often the app will check for new tweets.

If you haven’t warmed up to the multitude of swipe gestures in OS X Lion, and still like using the keyboard to get most things done, you might enjoy how this app works.

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Add A Hidden Toolbar To Unclutter The System Menu Bar With Bartender[Mac]

Bartender lets users keep only selected applications icons and indicators in system tray, and all other icons can be easily accessed with a click. Bartender offers an additional toolbar, where you can not only keep the applications’ icons of your choice, but also manage them with ease. Furthermore, it comes with a wide range of features that let you easily organize menu bar applications’ icons. You can select any active/passive menu bar app from Applications folder and add it to Bartender’s bar. Talking of the additional menu bar, it can be viewed by clicking Bartender’s icon in system menu bar. You can also bring it up using a specified hotkey combination. Keep reading for more details.

The utility allows you to display applications’ icons in menu bar for 5 seconds when they are being updated. This feature keeps you notified about all the applications that were recently updated with additional features. Apart from moving menu bar apps to Bartender’s menu bar, it lets you hide any active menu bar application. This app basically provides 3 menu bar-related options including show app icon in menu bar, show icon in Bartender’s bar and hide this (selected) menu bar item.

When launched, it sits in system menu bar, allowing you to launch and move application icons to its customizable menu bar. Clicking the menu bar icon lets you view Bartender’s menu bar, show all apps’ icons in system menu bar, and open Preferences, where you can add applications and set position of all currently running applications’ icons. The Menu Items tab reveals all the running menu bar applicationswith options to show selected app in system menu bar, Bartender’s menu bar or hide it from both menu bars.

As mentioned earlier, it lets you select menu bar applications to add their icons to either menu bar or Bartender’s toolbar. Just click add button in the left sidebar and select the application from Applications folder that you want to add to the list. Now, set what Bartender should do with selected menu bar item from main window. Here, you can also enable Item Updates option, which shows app icon in menu bar when it’s being updated.

The General tab deals with application-specific options including start app at login, show Bartender bar at launch, change application default menu bar icon etc.

The Advanced tab lets you show/hide Bartender’s menu bar icon, set hotkey combinations to show all items in menu bar, open Bartender and show full menu bar. You can also set what Bartender icon should do when clicked – display all items in menu bar, expand menu bar but keep items hidden, or open Bartender’s bar.

The application automatically adds all selected applications’ icons to its menu bar, which can be revealed by clicking Bartender’s icon in menu bar and via specified hotkey combination. Bartender provides an easy way to unclutter your ever growing menu bar item list. Not only does it organize running applications’ icons, but also lets you add any menu bar application and set its icon position. Bartender is a paid application, but you can grab it for free whilst it’s in beta testing phase.

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Sync Files Between As Many Folders As You Want with SyncDifferent in MAC

SyncDifferent  can sync files between as many folders as you want. The app lets you sync data from the source to the destination folder and vice-versa, and similarly, lets you sync any new files that are added to either one of the folders.

Launch the app and drag & drop the folders you want to sync on the A Folder and B Folder boxes, respectively. Click Add Task and the folders will appear in the panel below it. Next, hit Advanced and from the panel that slides open, and select how you want to sync files between the two folders. Once you’re done, click Scan Start.

When you click Scan Start, the app quickly syncs files between the folders as per the direction you chose. Upon addition of subsequent files, a notification appears in the top left area of your screen, showing you the time, path and file name. You can leave the app running in the background, and it will continue to sync files.

You can stop the scan anytime you like. The app is useful if you want to sync files between network folders, and don’t want to be bothered with minding the file size. It is also useful for syncing files between removable drives as well. Once you’ve synced files, you can stop the app from scanning and eject it.

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Real-Time Photo Sharing & Syncing Across PC, Mac, Android & iOS With Familiar

Familiar – a free app for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS that connects you to your close ones so that you can easily share photos with each other over the internet. Regardless of the devices or OS that your contacts are using, Familiar lets you share images with each other through slideshows. In essence, it’s a private social network comprising only your most important contacts, and lets you like, comment on and save all the photos that you’ve shared with each other. Apart from real-time syncing of shared photos, the app keeps you apprised of the addition of new photos to your contacts’ albums via push notifications.

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Encrypt Internet Traffic, Access Blocked Websites & Remove Ads Using Spotflux

Spotflux provides an encrypted connection, malware and virus protection, open and unrestricted access to blocked content, and a private, ad-free browsing experience. Keep reading past the break for further details.

When you start Spotflux, an encrypted and secure tunnel is set up. All your internet traffic is sent through the punctuation filters of Spotflux in order to clean it off from malware, privacy invading tracking cookies and advertisements. The result is a secure and encrypted connection that not only protects your privacy, but also prevents you safe from virus and malware Spotflux continuously scans and protects your internet traffic from inbound threats and gives you a highly-secured, ad-free browsing experience. Although it works as a VPN service by encrypting the internet traffic and allowing you to view blocked or restricted content, it is not exactly a VPN service. According to the product page, Spotflux leverages secure tunneling as part of it’s over-all solution.

Using the application is simple; it does not confuse you with a lot of configuration consoles. After installation, just Enable the application and the rest will be automatically taken care of.

The Settings dialog box (accessible from the top-left corner of the main window) allows you to specify general application behavior and configure proxy settings. You can choose to hide main window at startup and enable/disable warning messages and tray notifications.

Since all your internet traffic is encrypted and sent through the Spotflux cloud, you might feel the browsing experience to be a little slower. Considering the usefulness of this software, this is a very small cost to pay for safe and private internet usage. In our experience, AddictiveTips failed to load only once during all testing.

Below you can watch a video that explains how Spotflux works, and how it secure your internet traffic.

Currently, Spotflux is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. The mobile version is in works, and will be available soon.

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