The Grafx Blogs

I know a lot of people reading this will have iPhones as well as Macs, so today I thought I’d share a cheap, but very useful little tool called Pastebot.

Now you can copy and paste on the iPhone, I know a lot of people are doing so heavily, and while this is great, sometimes you need a little more. Pastebot is an iPhone app (currently £1.79) which allows you to store anything you copy on the iPhone, so you can store multiple “clips” for future use. You can store text or images and even manipulate them to make all the text UPPERCASE, or make a photo black and white, that kind of thing. Pretty handy.

Even more useful though is Pastebot Sync. It’s a free Mac application which allows you to share your Mac clipboard with your iPhone, or vice versa. So next time you find something cool on your Mac and you want to paste it into a text message on the iPhone, you can! It’s super simple and very powerful. I highly recommend you check out Pastebot on the App Store and Pastebot Sync at their website where there is a great demo video.

One of my most used applications, Dropbox is great for students, people with multiple computers and those wanting basic read-only access to documents on the go (on iPhone).

Dropbox is deceptively simple. Once installed you will have a Dropbox folder, just like any other in your Home folder. Drag any file or folder in there and it’s sync’d up instantly and invisibly to your online Dropbox account. You can then access that from any computer with an internet connection (just through a web browser), or on your iPhone (free app here).

Ninja move: install Dropbox on your iMac and your MacBook to get the contents sync’d across them automatically. You don’t even need both on at once as you can change something on the iMac, turn it off, go to work, open your MacBook and a few seconds later it will sync down and be ready for you.

If you want a simple way to get a few important files backed up off-site, to share files with friends online, or just to get your files/preferences sync’d across computers it’s a great way to go. Loads more info on uses and features can be found here, with a short demo video below.

Dropbox is free if you want up to 2GB storage (enough for most people). If you want to you can upgrade to 50GB for USD$9.99/month or 100GB for USD$19.99/month.

You can see a demo video here.

This is an app I couldn’t live without, so I thought I’d share it with you. We all know how useful Apple’s Keychain is in saving our passwords, but 1Password takes it a stage further.

One of my favourite features is the secure password generation. Many of my customers use very insecure passwords, and nearly all of you use the same password for everything. This isn’t very secure. 1Password can generate massively secure passwords for you, and store them for you so you never need to remember them.

1Password integrates with Safari, Firefox and other browsers so you can enter your usernames and secure passwords at the click of a button. 1Password can also store details about you, your credit cards, your software licences and much more. This means that the next time you sign up for a new service (like Amazon or something) you can click one button and have the form filled out with your name, address etc.

It’s all stored securely so you don’t need to worry about security. There is also an iPhone app, so if you want to log int to Twitter, Gmail or even your online banking on the go you now can, securely.

The free trial is highly recommended and will save you a ton of time and effort which is what computers are for right?

It’s a tough thing to admit as a Mac user, but when Windows 7 hit the streets there was one feature I really liked about it. If you drag a window to the edge of the screen then it will snap to that edge, and resize appropriately.

This is a great feature, useful for moving things from one window to another, cut and paste, layout, proofing and file transfer among many other uses.

Now you can do this in Mac OS X! It’s a USD$7 app called Cinch. It’s a tiny download and when you launch it a new menu bar icon will appear in the top right of your screen. Just start dragging windows to the edge of the screen for easy access. The videos are below, and I can say from experience how useful it is. Simple but effective.

A demo video is available here.

I don’t like to promote a single service or application too much on a blog which is associated with work – it doesn’t seem quite right. In this case though it’s an application I use daily and it saves my bacon constantly. That app is Skitch.

Skitch is a super simple app for editing images and sharing them. I can make a step by step guide of how a customer should do something in seconds with screenshots, arrows and highlighting. Then I email it to the customer so they can resolve an issue without needing me to do it for them. The best part is that if they run into the same trouble again, they can refer back to that email.

Skitch is useful for all kinds of things

You can use it for all kinds of things. Skitch is so easy to use you won’t believe it, and the best part is that it’s free! Check it out at www.skitch.com