Tips and tricks you didn't know you could do with Google for on the go, at work and having fun.
I’ve been on the lookout for a Google Hangouts desktop app for the Mac and there are actually few decent choices out there. First off, I don’t want to run a Chrome extension and I don’t want to have to keep Gmail open in the background. That works for some, but it’s either out of sight, out of mind, or it’s jumping up in front of everything else annoying me.
My goal is a Hangout app that can live without a browser. Recently I found. YakYak is actually quite impressive. It looks great, works pretty darn good, and it’s free currently.
I accidentally stumbled upon it the other day and I’ve been using it ever since. So far, so good, however it’s currently in development and does lack some features; like spell check. I also purchased not long ago. It’s a pretty good app that looks similar to Hangouts. The main downsides are that it’s a paid app, although not too spendy, and it has a weird “feature” where it makes the active chat tab grey and background tabs white. This is backwards to me.
Was the hot new app not long ago, but recently it went free and then I think development stopped, or slowed way down. It’s a decent app, great interface, spell check, and free. Definitely worth checking out since it’s free, but it’s starting to show the lack of updates as some things don’t seem to work like they should.
Janitor for kodi mac os x 2. If you have Mac OS X 10.8 or higher then you might get a message saying that Kodi 'can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer'. This is due to the OS X Gatekeeper feature that is designed to discourage users from downloading from random locations and possibly installing. From Official Kodi Wiki. Jump to: navigation, search. This addon will automatically scan your library for watched movies, TV show episodes and music videos, and delete them from the file system based on numerous critia such as age, rating, free disk space, etc.
There’s also and but I haven’t tried them. They look a lot like Hangouts Plus though.
Easy Duplicate Finder will help you find duplicates in Photos in no time. To scan your Photos library for duplicate picture, select the Photos Scan mode from the drop-down menu and follow the prompts to run a scan. You will be able to preview all the photos and move the duplicates to the 'EDF Trash' album, so that you can then delete them from within the Photos app. It will check your Photos library for duplicate images and show them sorted into duplicate groups where one file is the original and the rest are its copies.
Messages and work with Hangouts too, but only for basic text messages. They don’t include some of the bells and whistles and they don’t do a good job at marking things as read in Gmail. When I go back into Gmail, I hate seeing unread Hangout conversations when I’ve already completed those conversations. At the end of the day, there really isn’t any great Hangouts desktop app for the Mac. There are some pretty good choices, but Hangouts is still best in the browser, even if some of us don’t want to be locked in the browser.
Keeping mail, address book and calendar up to date across different computers can be surprisingly difficult. Once you have a desktop at work, a laptop for out and about as well as a tablet and phone, well, it just gets complicated. I’m a long time Mac user, have paid my MobileMe dues and tried all sorts of other tricks over time.
But never really had it sorted. Here is my current way of managing information across iMac, Macbook Pro, iPad and iPhone. I use Google G Suite (formerly Google Apps) for my mail and calendar.
If you haven’t come across it before, Google G Suite lets you use a Gmail account with your own domain – plus a whole bunch of other resources as part of a single account (Google Calendar and Google Docs being the main ones of interest). We use Google G Suite ourselves, but also set it up for a lot of clients along with their business websites, so I get to see quite a bit of it in action. For reasons explained below, I use Address Book for my contacts, but not Google Contacts.
If you aren’t a Google G Suite user, this will also work for a Gmail account (see below). Here is what I do so that everything is up to date.
Mail While I used to use webmail, I now use Postbox via IMAP. Read this detailed walk through if you are have a large Gmail mailbox (as I did – once) and it has stopped you using IMAP in the past –. If you are fine with webmail, simply use Safari, Firefox or Chrome – I’ve used the Google G Suite control panel to configure my webmail link using the mail.mydomain.com URL. On my iPad I use Safari/webmail. And on my iPhone I use the Mailbox app, which is pretty handy.
IMHO, stay well away from POP/IMAP access to email. Life is too short. (I’ve sorted out the IMAP issue these days with Postbox – see the link above). Calendar I use Google Calendar, and can access it via the web interface (calendar.mydomain.com), or from Apple’s (now useful) iCal. To connect iCal to Google Calendar on your iMac, iPad or iPhone: • Create a CalDAV Account • on an iMac, open iCal, Preferences, Accounts and click the + to add an account • on an iPad or iPhone, go to Settings, Mail, Contacts & Calendars, Add Account, Other, Add CalDAV Account • Configure the CalDAV Account: use www.google.com for the Server, your full Google Apps username as the username (e.g. [email protected]) and your password That is it. Whether you are using Google Calendar via a browser or using iCal, you are working with the same calendar information.