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Posts Tagged ‘Many Thanks’

TUAW Review: Checkout, top notch Point of Sale software for Mac

Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Reviews

I had the opportunity to speak with the creators of Checkout: an excellent Point of Sale application for the Mac. I’ve been working with the app for several weeks now and have been thoroughly impressed by it, especially after the developers shared their perspectives. Many thanks to Ed and Dirk for walking me through it.

Whether you’re starting a new store or transferring your current system to Checkout, it’s the best Point of Sale I’ve worked with in my many years of retail. The creators explained that they designed Checkout to help small and mid-sized retail stores make sales, print receipts, manage stock, organize customers, and collect payments.

This application focuses heavily on ease-of-use in everything from installation to managing metrics and allows the user to remove “unneeded complexities” from the system they work with every day.

Read on for a full walk-through of the application.

Continue reading TUAW Review: Checkout, top notch Point of Sale software for Mac

TUAWTUAW Review: Checkout, top notch Point of Sale software for Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Slim your 1Password 3 Backups

Filed under: Software, TUAW Tips

1Password is one of my very favorite and most essential Mac utilities. Combined with Dropbox, I can have all of my login information synced to all of my Macs.

The other day I noticed that 1Password had gained a lot of weight, specifically around the backups area. I’m not usually one to comment on such things, but we weren’t talking about “love handles,” 1Password’s backups had gone from 1MB to 21MB literally overnight. On August 28th, the backups were 1MB, and on August 29th, the backups were suddenly 21MB.

Wait? Did you say August 28th? Isn’t that when Snow Leopard was released? Yes it was. And wasn’t that when you switched from 1Password version 2 to 1Password version 3? Yes it was. Could that have something to do with it?

I contacted 1Password’s excellent support staff who correctly diagnosed that the increase was related to the preview images which are used for Login and Software License icons. (These can be found in the 1Password.agilekeychain/a/default/thumb folder.) Each preview image take about 100K. With 600+ items in my agilekeychain, this quickly added up.

Fortunately, this is easily fixed. If disk space is a concern, the icons and previews can be deleted using 1Password > Preferences > General > Remove all icons and previews. I also unchecked the box next to “Automatically download icons and previews for new Logins.” After I did that, the backup size went from 21.5MB to 889KB!

Why worry about space with today’s hard drive spaces? I have 1Password set to backup to my Dropbox account, which is limited to a total of 5GB. Plus this meant having to upload 20+MB every day versus <1MB. Personally I neither use nor need the icons, so it’s no loss to me, and it makes a big difference.

Many thanks to the 1Password folks for helping me get to the bottom of this mystery!

TUAWSlim your 1Password 3 Backups originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ReadTwit: All the Links From Your Twitter Stream in A Filtered RSS Feed

In these hard times, it takes something pretty nifty to get us to write about a Twitter app; our eyebrows rose an inch or two when we were told about ReadTwit, an RSS application that makes Twitter smaller, faster, and better for those who need to find and consume interesting links.

ReadTwit scrapes the tweets from everyone you follow and throws any links therein into an RSS feed just for you, with dupes deleted and URL shorteners eliminated. Users are then able to control the display, filter out users, or ban hashtags. Read on for screenshots and more.

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As you can see, ReadTwit is compatible with a few good feed readers; we decided to test the app in Google Reader.

As soon as we clicked the Google Reader link, we were subscribed and checking out some very real-time news from our friends around the web, complete with images and summaries from the linked-to pages:

And here’s a look at ReadTwit’s filters and display options in action:

A related Firefox add-on, Tweecious, posts all the links in your Twitter stream to your Del.icio.us account. Still, we prefer ReadTwit’s filtering capabilities and Google Reader integration.

ReadTwit is a product from Lionite, a two-year-old web dev shop in Israel. “One of us came up with the idea,” reads their About page, “and it seemed simple enough, so we said ‘What the heck?’ The project took several days from concept to launch.”

Although they acknowledge the app’s not a life-changer, the ReadTwit team is correct in stating that it makes a common web service easier to use. Many thanks to Ezra Butler for the pointer.

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