The solution, either wiggle the mouse ever now and again or install Caffeine, its is a tiny program (240 KB) that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Its really simple, you click it to prevent your Mac from ever automatically going to sleep again, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again and the default settings are resumed.

Off

On

Holding down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.

The Caffeine Menu

I think this is an essential app for that does lots of downloading or streaming of flash based video, it couldn’t be any simpler and I cant think of any functionality that could usefully be added, oh and did i mention its free.

(5/5) Stars

Download it here

]]> http://www.whysoscared.com/caffeineessential-software/feed/ 0 http://www.whysoscared.com/grabup-essential-software/ http://www.whysoscared.com/grabup-essential-software/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:46:41 +0000 Juo http://www.whysoscared.com/?p=33 This is my first post in essential software over at http://grabup.com/ there is a free and pro version.

Sending screen grabs to your friends has always been an unnecessarily slow and arduous task. Taking the screen shot, opening a browser, loading up an image host, uploading the image then copying and pasting the link… grabup makes that entire process instant. – We invite you to watch the video

GrabUp is an interesting little app that adds a new feature to OS X’s built in screen capturing functionality. When you install the preference pane,

it allows you to add the GrabUp menu item to your menu bar.

How To Use GrabUp

GrabUp will then be installed on your system. To invoke the functionality you hit Shift – Command – 4). Once you hit the key combo a crosshair pops up, letting you select part of your screen to capture. The image is saved to your desktop and uploaded to GrabUp’s server and the URL is automatically added to your clipboard. The idea is that this will make it very easy to share screen captures over IM or email since no account is needed. GrabUp just uploads the image and returns a unique URL.

The free service will send the image to free GrabUp hosted page, this is great to link friends and family too.

The pay for version lets you upload images to a custom FTP server, like this. You can even add a custom graphic onto grabs using the free PHP script sent. (This is great for websites that want to watermark images).

I feel a few features are missing and apparently i’m not the only one users at getsatisfaction.com share some of these requests.

• Like auto trimming of URL’s (With services like http://tr.im/ and http://www.rubyurl.com/)
• SFTP S Support
• Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

The application has had one update since launch, I don’t think the makers are interested in adding any further functionality, this called be called lazy but I view it as a good thing, why break what’s already working?

I feel GrabUp has a few bugs and some features that should have been added for the $20 price tag (which I think is pretty steep), I feel it does what it made for perfectly. (4/5 Stars)