The guys over at TwoCanoes have a couple of very cool apps that may save you some time and energy.

First up is Salute, which pays homage to the Windows ‘three fingers salute‘, which as any Windows user knows is ctrl-alt-del and saves you from typically inexplicable and painful software crashes. This version, for your Mac, offers you the pabilty to:

• lock your screen with a screensaver (you need to enable that on your system first - click the question mark in Salute to learn more)
• open Terminal - to kill those pesky apps from the command line
• open Activity Monitor - to manage those same crashed apps using a GUI

For best results, put it in your Login Items (System Preferences/Accounts/your username/Login Items). I find it is useful to quickly lock my screen by hitting ctrl-cmd-del, then ‘enter’ once more in qck succession, sicne ’screensaver’ is thoughtfully the default button.

My only suggestion or ‘wish list’ item for this app is to see an option to start the ‘Force Quit’ dialog in future iterations.

As is though, it is already part of my computing routine.

The next app from TwoCanoes is WinClone, which lets BootCamp users make disk images of their Windows partitions for easy backup/restoration to other systems.
As an IT guy who has to deal with a growing number of Win/Mac scenarios, I have a feeling I will be using this one quite a bit in the future!

Both of these apps are free, but you can donate to their future development by using the link on the WinClone page or by sending donations to donations at twocanoes.com.

Technorati Tags: apple, apps, macbook, software, tips

• Discuss
• Share, Bookmark, Email
• Print
• apple, apps, macbook, salute, Software, Tips, winclone

Related Links from the Web