Smell-O-Mints also provides a number of handy specialized views of the periodic table that just aren’t possible with a sheet of paper. (Another advantage of digital tables is that they can be quickly updated when new elements are discovered or created-there are a few more today than when I was in science class.) And after you find an element, you can click on the globe button next to its name to open that element’s entry in the online encyclopedia in your browser. Conversely, if you can’t find a certain element, you can type its name in the Find Element box to highlight it in the table and see its details on screen. Unlike paper tables, which show each element’s symbol and name, Smell-O-Mints shows only an element’s symbol by default clicking on the element reveals its name. Click on an element to see more information about it in a detail box in the lower left corner of the screen.Ī good high-school chemistry book provides most of this information, but Smell-O-Mints takes advantage of its digital nature with a few unique features. Like any good periodic table, Smell-O-Mints shows all the known elements in their proper locations, using color to designate elemental types (metals, noble gases, and so on). John Schilling has obliged by bringing back his free (donations accepted) Smell-O-Mints 2.1 ( )-an electronic periodic table of the elements-with a major feature update and a pleasing Aqua interface. (SlimBatteryMonitor uses the same data as Apple’s battery monitor, so the gauges are equally accurate.) Each state provides different, independent options, so you can get exactly the information you want for each state. Unlike Apple’s battery monitor, which shows the same information at all times, SlimBatteryMonitor has three display states-while running on battery, while battery is charging, and when battery is charged. (It also looks nicer.)īut its customization options are what I like best about SlimBatteryMonitor. What makes SlimBatteryMonitor better? As its name implies, it’s slimmer than OS X’s built-in battery-monitor display, giving you more room for other menu-bar items. If you have an iBook or a PowerBook, you should check out Colin Henein’s free (donations accepted) SlimBatteryMonitor 1.2 ( ). First, it takes up a lot of menu-bar space. OS X provides a battery-status item for the menu bar-you enable it via the Energy Saver preference pane-but it has two drawbacks. If you’re a laptop user, you need to be aware of your battery’s status: whether or not it’s fully charged, how much time you have left before it runs out of power, and so on. If you frequently work with messy text, a little textSoap makes cleanup easier. And in case having to paste your text into the textSoap window sounds like a hassle, textSoap can also work in other ways: via a contextual menu through OS X’s Services menu from within supported apps (such as BBEdit, Mailsmith, and Eudora) and using AppleScript. It’s quite pleasing to see a mess of forwarded text instantly transform into nice, neat paragraphs.Īll of these cleaners are very useful, but what won me over is the ability to create custom cleaners. More-complex cleaners include Scrub-which strips spaces, forwarding arrows, and line feeds rewraps paragraphs and converts Hex designations (such as %20 and the similar gunk you often see in e-mail messages) to their ASCII equivalents (turning the aforementioned characters into a space, for example). For example, Spaces replaces multiple contiguous spaces with a single space Forwarding removes the pesky arrow characters (>) from forwarded e-mail text, and cleaners such as Uppercase, Capitalize Words, and Straighten Quotes let you manipulate case and formatting. The available cleaners range from the simple to the comprehensive. Simply paste your text into the textSoap text window and then select your favorite cleaner -a set of rules that tell textSoap exactly what you want done with your text-and your text is ready for pasting. True to its name, textSoap cleans your text-much faster than you can with your mouse, arrow keys, and delete key.
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