If home is where your heart is, then there’s a pretty good chance that home—or at least your Home Folder—is where you prefer to keep your business’ financial information. While there are plenty of excellent Web-based apps you can use for tracking your business finances, if you’re uncomfortable with the idea of working within a browser and keeping your business’ financial information in the cloud, a traditional Mac application is your best option. I looked at four apps for managing your business invoicing and finances: Cognito Software’s MoneyWorks Gold, The Acclivity Group’s…

I ve been using my MacBook Pro since a while now and I must say: I really love it. The most common app(s) that designers use has to be Adobe Photoshop (Or the full suite). The app(s) are great, but there is a downside: The price tag. Photoshop CS4 costs $699, CS4 extended is $ and the full Creative Suite starts at an stunning $1799. For many people this is just a little bit too much to play around with . Luckily, there are also many free applications out there that can do the same kind of job that Photoshop could do for you

If you’re already backing up your Mac—perhaps by following the simple steps in “Backup Basics”—pat yourself on the back. Having any sort of backup is much better than having none, and your probability of recovering from data loss is dramatically increased. But for many people, a barebones backup strategy won’t cut it. If your livelihood depends on your data being available at all times, if you’re in the middle of a time-sensitive project, or if you’re just paranoid and want to make sure nothing has fallen through the cracks, you may want more of a guarantee. How can you tu

What is Scapple? Scapple is an easy-to-use tool for getting ideas down as quickly as possible and making connections between them. It isn’t exactly mind-mapping software—it’s more like a freeform text editor that allows you to make notes anywhere on the page and to connect them using straight dotted lines or arrows. If you’ve ever scribbled down ideas all over a piece of paper and drawn lines between related thoughts, then you already know what Scapple does. Scapple’s nonlinear approach to the process of creative thinking is similar to what Gabriele Rico calls “clustering” in…

Expanding encryption and compression capabilities to Apple devices and users, SecureZIP is now available for Mac OS X. This Smart Encryption software combines the world’s most interoperable data compression format with strong encryption to deliver a data-centric security solution for Mac users. SecureZIP is the long-trusted security and compression solution from PKWARE, and an integral element of the Smart Encryption Platform already protecting information on mainframes, servers, PCs, laptops and other mobile devices

Firewalls monitor and regulate the data moving on and off your computer or network. They can keep criminals out while allowing legitimate network traffic in. Mac OS X comes with not one but two firewalls of its own. However, those two aren’t always enough. The Threat Years ago, a bug (long-since fixed) let attackers send Macs a so-called “ping of death”—specially designed network traffic that could crash a system. There aren’t any such network vulnerabilities on Macs (that we know of) now, but many of Apple’s security updates specifically address network vulnerabilities. Clearly…

Mac users who want to (or have to) use Intuit’s QuickBooks have plenty of choices—we can run the Mac, Windows, or Web app version. One of those options probably pops out as an obvious choice, but as I recently discovered, the least-obvious solution is sometimes the best one. My wife and I are both professional writers. A few months ago, on the advice of our accountant, we reorganized our small business as a corporation. We agreed to endure a considerable amount of extra paperwork in exchange for significant financial and legal benefits. Accountants love QuickBooks (even if authors…