Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Friday Favorite Triple Pack: Alarm Clock 2, Apptrap, and TimeMachineEditor

They are all one-trick-ponies, take up little space, are free for the downloading, and Apple should buy them up for Snow Leopard.

Alarm Clock 2
, currently up to version 2.4.5, sits nicely on your menubar ready to awaken you with your favorite song, or remind you that your dinner is ready to come out of the oven. You can set an alarm to use any song from your iTunes library, or if no song is chosen, it will just beep at you.

It has an Easy Wake option that slowly brings up the volume of your chosen song over an adjustable period of up to two minutes. As any good alarm clock, it comes with a snooze feature, which is also adjustable. I use it mostly as a kitchen timer that keeps me out of the kitchen. Multiple alarms can be set of course, and if you happen to have an Apple remote lying around, pushing the pause button will tell an alarm to 'snooze'. Since downloading it, I can't think of a day that that I haven't used it at least once



Apptrap is a preference pane that allows you to delete applications more completely than dragging to the trash and emptying. Trashing the normal way usually leaves support files in your library folder that will never go away and do nothing more useful than take up space.

With Apptrap installed, whenever you drag an application to the trash and try and empty the trash, you are presented with a window showing you the file and all support files that go along with the application, allowing you to trash them all together in one stroke. There are no settings, options or anything else to worry about. Just install it and forget it. The next time you delete an application, it will be there for you.

Note that AppTrap is open source but is no longer being actively maintained; the developer is looking for someone to pick up the project. If you want a commercially supported uninstall tool, you can check out the $12.95US AppZapper or the highly-recommended and multicapable file organizer Hazel for $21.95. Mat also wrote up a helpful Mac 101 on uninstaller tools last year.


TimeMachineEditor stops Time Machine from backing up every hour. On my network, with four Macs backing up to Time Machine, hourly, the network slows down to a crawl. This is especially annoying since my information isn't critical enough to be backed that frequently. TimeMachineEditor allows you to set exactly when Time Machine will run.

You can set backups for hourly intervals, like every 12 hours, or set up calendar backups which allow you to backup daily, weekly or monthly at any time you set. The hourly calendar interval is new to version 2.1. I have my Macs backup once a day during the wee hours with each Mac staggered by an hour or so to keep the network hit to a minimum.

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