11. Typeit4me
Type less, but say more
Price: $19.99
TypeIt4Me comes with a few sample
clippings, and as our library grew, we really appreciated all the sorting
options. You can order your list by most used, last used, alphabet, last added,
and so on, and sync your clipping sets over iCloud to other Macs and iOS
devices with TypeIt4Me Touch ($4.99, universal). If you want to get old-school,
a printable list of your clippings and abbreviations is one click away. And
it’s easy to exclude some apps or restrict certain clipping sets to certain
apps. You can even set up trigger keys that you have to press before an
abbreviation, to avoid typing them inadvertently. Your clippings don’t have to
be plain text, either. They can be rich text, images, or have special
characters like tabs and returns. You can insert the date and time, nest
clippings inside each other and even run AppleScripts.
One
of the more useful examples: a short blog post’s worth of lorem ipsum
placeholder text.
The bottom line
Category-leading TextExpander ($34.99 Mac,
$4.99 iOS) goes further, letting you set up form-letter-like snippets and share
your snippets on the web. But if you can forgo those, TypeIt4Me is just as
great at saving you time.
·
Product: TypeIt4Me 5.3.2
·
Company: Ettore Software
·
Contact: www.ettoresoftware.com
·
Price: $19.99
·
Requirements: 64-bit processor, OS X 10.7 or
later
Positives: Nearly as robust as TextExpander
but for less. On sale for $4.99 at press time. Syncs to a universal $4.99 app
for iPad/iPhone
Negatives: Missing some of TextExpander’s
more advanced features. No sharing or importing of clipping sets.
Rated (Great): 4/5
12. ReadKit
Where to read your read-it-latters when
it’s later
Price: $4.99
Your digital reading pile can get as
disorganized as that stack of magazines on the nightstand, especially if you
use more than one service. ReadKit streamlines your reading with offline
support for Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability, plus bookmarks from Pinboard
and Delicious. (Pinboard and Instapaper require paid accounts.) ReadKit lists
each account in the sidebar, including categories such as Delicious and
Pinboard’s private folders, and the way Pocket splits your entries into
Articles, Videos, and Images. Mouse over a service’s name and select Hide to
collapse the lists.
Instapaper,
Delicious, Pocket, Readability, and Pinboard, all in one client
The toolbar along the bottom has a button
to switch the view from folders to tags, and a tag button under the preview
pane lets you add new tags to each entry. You can search to filter, hide, or
show any of the panels, tweak the article font and interface theme, and display
the unread count in the dock. Buttons at the top let you send an article to
Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, email, or iMessage, or mark it read or as a
favorite. When you switch to Pinboard or Delicious, those buttons change to a
browser-like forward/back/refresh scheme. The internal browser renders pages
well, including streaming video, but we did hit some hiccups when loading pages
with pop-ups. And you can’t manage your folders within ReadKit – you have to
use each service’s site or app, and then refresh ReadKit to see the changes.
The bottom line
Saving articles for later reading works
best if you actually go back and read them later, and ReadKit makes it easy.
·
Product: ReadKit 1.2
·
Company: Webin
·
Contact: www.readkitapp.com
·
Price: $4.99
·
Requirements: 64-bit processor, OS X 10.7 or
later
Positives: Simple, effective way to
organize tons of offline reading material. Good interface and stable
performance.
Negatives: Only one reading list visible at
any given time. No ability to make custom folders to drag in articles from
different services.
Rated (Great): 4/5
13. Doo
document organizer
How to find things in the cloud
Price: Free
With our files scattered across so many
cloud services, it can be a pain to remember where we put things. With Doo
Document Organizer, that problem is a thing of the past.
Think of Doo as kind of like a Finder for
the cloud. Once you link your storage services – Dropbox, Google Drive, and
SkyDrive – it quickly indexes your files and folders and presents them all for
easy viewing, either as a giant list or organized by location. It does the same
for your email or any local folder on your Mac; just tell Doo where to look and
it will add whatever it finds to your library. And if you’re wary about letting
Doo see too much, it’s easy to eliminate folders and wide swaths of files from
its prying eyes.
With
Doo’s sorting options, you’ll never forget which cloud is storing your
document.
Much like the Finder, there’s no actual
editing to be done in Doo. In simple terms, it’s like a dynamic snapshot of
your documents; none of your files are actually moved or copied, but anything
can be accessed in an instant and quickly opened in its associated app. You can
view your documents in preview or list mode, and finding things is a snap
thanks to predictive search, coupled with powerful, multi-layered sorting.
Constant syncing makes sure everything stays current, and a handy duplicate
finder helps eliminate clutter.
Like other cloud services, Doo puts a limit
on its free tier, and while the 1GB cap is one of lowest we’ve seen, a bit of
selection should keep Doo humming along. We were bummed to learn that Doo couldn’t
sync our iCloud documents, and while we were interested to add our mail
accounts, it required us to set far too many filtering rules to make it
useful.
The bottom line
If you’ve ever wished for a cloud-powered
Finder, you can’t Doo much better than this.
·
Product: Doo 1.0.5
·
Company: Doo.net
·
Contact: http://doo.net
·
Price: Free. (Storage beyond the free 1GB starts
at $4.99/month for 10GB).
·
Requirements: OS X 10.8.2 or later.
Positives: Excellent file handling. Powerful
sorting and searching. Speedy syncing
Negatives: Small storage cap requires
vigilance. No support for iCloud files.
Rated (Great): 4/5
