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Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users

5 Amazing Children's Books Apps for the iPad

The iPad is proving to be a big hit with kids. They already love the iPhone but they love the iPad even more because its bigger. A fast becoming popular category is the Children's books. With the iPad's gorgeous screen, audio capabilities and that great touch input allowing interactivity, it's not difficult to see why. Here's a list of some of the best iPad children's Books Apps that are available:

Aesop's Fables Audiobook

A beautiful rendition of 20 classic all-time favorite fables that teach morals. Next, think of spinning the wheel of fortune. Before reading any stories, children have to spin the wheel that makes selection of fable story fun and exciting. Readers are also rewarded with simple spot-the-difference games after reading fables. It also has both pre-recorded and recording audio functions in different languages. With intuitive and fun elements, children will grow to love this reading experience.


link to iTunes

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50+ Mac Applications with Great Interface

Having used Mac for quite some time, I discover that I deeply fall in love with smooth and sleek interface offered by most of Mac built-in applications.

And the good news is, there are many third-party applications out there developed with more or less the same design standard as those built-in Mac apps. More than fifty sample screenshots of beautiful Mac applications are ready to amaze you after the jump.

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Mac Applications for Tagging Files

Often, we have plenty of important working stuffs stored on our Mac. Without proper management on those files, it will be difficult for us to search and get back to our previous work files.

One way to manage our files is by grouping files. There are some worth mention Mac File Tagging Applications that can help us grouping, categorizing, and managing our precious files using tags.

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Mac Application Updaters

Sometimes, it's difficult to search and update to the latest Mac applications. This may hinder some people in using their Macs. In order to reduce the hassle searching for required applications, we can use application updaters, which will do the information gathering for us.

Some application updaters can be seen after the jump.

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Fave Mac App 3. Path Finder 5

Path Finder is an award-winning file browser and management application for Mac OS X. This is achieved by adding on more useful features to the familiar user interface of Finder.

There are several features that I like to use while using Path Finder:

  1. Multiple Tabs Browsing
    Sometimes we might need to open multiple Finder window to drag-drop or browse around directories. Using Path Finder, we can combine all these opened windows into just a single window with multiple tabs.
  2. Temporary Stack
    Although the drag-drop technique has become my habit in boosting my productivity in handling files. Path Finder enhances this experience by adding temporary stack where we can have a temporary place for drag-drop process.
  3. Dual Pane File Browsing
    Often, we need to view different folders side by side. And the good news is, Path Finder provides the dual pane browsing ability for us. This feature of Path Finder is just too good to be missed.
  4. Quick Preview
    By default, if we want to show information of certain item on Finder, we will reveal the Get Info pane by hitting keystrokes Cmd-Opt-I.
    However in Path Finder, we can just toggle on Preview Mode and we can have all important information the item has.
  5. Recent Applications
    Path Finder can also help us keeping track of up to 50 recent applications.

Even though it's quite pricey for an application, I still recommend using Path Finder. Path Finder really helps a lot in enhancing your Mac experience. For your information, there is 30-day trial provided for this application.

Screenshots are provided after the jump.

Homepage | Download Link: Leopard ↓ - Snow Leopard ↓ | License: $39.95

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Fave Mac App 2. Adium

Adium is an application that lets you chat with your friends across many chat networks easily at the same time. With Adium, you can connect to Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, and many others with just one single chat client.

Adding to its value, Adium also provides us with interface to Twitter and Facebook. And if you can't past a single moment without chit-chat with friends, Adium suits you most.

Homepage | Download Link ↓ | License Type: Freeware

Categories: Applications
Tags: Adium, Application

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Fave Mac App 1. Facebook Notifications

Facebook Notifications is an application that alerts you when new activities happen on Facebook and also helps you easily update your status.

If you are one of Facebook active members, this application suits you best.
I personally feel it's quite troublesome to browse into Facebook only to check for new notifications.

Homepage | Download Link ↓ | License Type: Freeware

Categories: Applications
Tags: Application, Facebook, Notification

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5% Discount for Mac Sale Bundle

It's only several days left until the end of The Mac Sale. In this bundle, you can grab up to 10 great applications worth of $450 with just $49.99. This is the first good news.

The second good news we have here: you can get another 5% discount for the bundle.
If you use USINGMAC as your coupon code, you can get that discount.

For more information of the applications inside the bundle, you can visit The Mac Sale.

Categories: Applications, Special Event
Tags: Bundle, Discount, Event

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85 Useful Free Mac Apps for Designers

With many applications emerging one after another, it's not really difficult to find free apps out of the net. Perhaps, those free applications are suitable for us compared to commercial ones.

Knowing there are quite a number of designers out there using a Mac, we compiled free Mac applications for designers. In this compilation, you can find useful Mac applications that can be downloaded and used for free.

Update. Some screenshots are added for readers' convenience.

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30 Free System Tools for a Better Mac

It's not an easy task to maintain our Mac system clean, healthy, and appealing with just relying on built-in applications. We will end up scratching our head just to delete some unnecessary binary files to clean our disk.

Therefore, we all here decided to make a good compilation of free system tools for Mac. With many varieties of applications, from system cleaner to system tweaker, from data organizer to system display manager, we have those all collected in this article.

Click on the application title to get to application homepage.

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20+ Free Productivity Booster Apps for Mac

Lacking of productivity applications will slow down our workflow and consume more time, even though we've already purchased a Mac. Using only built-in Mac applications, we can neither get the most out of our Mac nor boost our productivity.

In this article, we've compiled several free applications for Mac OS X (including application launcher, easy note-taker application, data backup tool, data sharing utility, etc) that can significantly boost your productivity.

Let us know which one is your favorite!

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Experience iTunes Like Never Before with Additional Freewares

Having my Mac accompanying my daily life, it would be a miss without the companion of music. And for now, I still adore iTunes as my music player. However, there are still some limitations to the awesomeness of iTunes, such as hard to rate, difficult to find lyrics, little information in mini player mode, etc.

In this article, I am going to share with you some of the freewares that can make you experience iTunes like never before. Hope you enjoy it!

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30+ Free Menubar Applications for Mac

Menubar applications are sometimes more favorable than normal applications because not only these menubar applications can run seamlessly on background but also they can save most of our valuable dock space.

Most importantly, in this article you will see some variations of useful, free menubar applications. Let's try them out!

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VirtualBox, The Free Virtual Machine

VirtualBox Icon

I was using VMware Fusion a while before I discovered VirtualBox. My intention is purely to test my web application on IE6+. That’s the reason why I would rather go for VirtualBox as a free, more lightweight and faster Virtual Machine developed and continuously enhanced by Sun Microsystems.

VirtualBox has a lot of similarities to VMware Fusion or Parallel in term of functions. However, from what I observe, VirtualBox is much faster and consumes less memory than VMware Fusion as well as Parallel. You can download and give it a try at http://www.virtualbox.org.

If your intention is like me, to use a Virtual Machine software to test your application on IE6+, VirtualBox perfectly suits you. Although VM Ware Fusion and Parallel are racing for the number of functionalities, VirtualBox on the other hands, try to optimize the speed and add in reasonable functions to suit with the basic purposes of using a virtual machine.

Yet another great thing about this open source application is that it can run on other operating system as well (e.g. Linux, Windows and Solaris).

Here is the starting point of VirtualBox.

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Enhance Your Music Life with iTunes

iTunes has often been carved deep inside our mind as one of the coolest music player that we have on our Mac. Apart from playing music, many useful features also can be added to your iTunes experience. From the music shuffling to music sharing over network, from tweaking rating system to setting music duration, will be discussed in this article as well as some other cool features.

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Leopard Glossy Black Dock Skin

As requested by our readers, today we'd love to share a quick tip on customizing the Dock. Your Dock will become like what's shown on the screenshot…

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Mac Apps that Stand Out from the Crowd

There are too many Mac applications readily available which, either directly or indirectly, confuse most Mac users, making them hard to find the best application. On the other side, most application developers also feel really itch-scratching to think of fresh and unique application.

To my surprise, some developers have amazed me with their applications that came out different than others, such as application to set different Docks on different Spaces, to set different wallpaper on different Spaces, to bring you to cleaning room, and many other creative yet useful functionality.

There are many of them, but here I will mention some that I am currently using.

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Mac Image Viewers

Most Mac users will like to use Preview as their image viewer. Most users will also use iPhoto. But few of us, feeling not satisfied with these built-in applications, seeks for better image viewers.

As a matter of fact, there are many Mac image viewers built by developers, such as Xee, CocoViewX and Sequential, just to name a few. After having fun with some of them, I've come up with this list of Mac image viewers to share with you.

Let's see what are these Mac image viewers.

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100+ Free Applications for Mac OS X

Most of the time, Windows users are reluctant to switch to a Mac. One amongst many reasons is that they found it hard to search for free softwares/applications for the Mac. Some of them have already switched to a Mac, but they're still running Windows OS on a Mac.

It's such an irony that actually there are mountains of free Mac applications available for us. After days of working on this, I've come out with list of free and useful Mac applications.

I've categorized and arranged the order of applications so that it will be extremely easy for you to find applications you need for your Mac.

Continue reading and you will see fabulous list of 100+ Free Mac OS X Applications!

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Tricks for Mac Stickies

Stickies, as the name suggests, is an application readily available on your Mac to let you stick your thoughts - in a form of small notes - on your Desktop.
Stickies reside inside Applications → Stickies.

Not only limited to making notes, but with Stickies you can also perform several tricks, such as embedding picture, scrolling down notes, making stickies translucent, and many other tricks.

Upon continuing reading this article, you will see several tricks for using Mac Stickies.

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