Replace Your Menubar Clock.  Plus Get More Control of Screen Brightness.

Each week I sniff around the bowels of MacUpdate. In between the dank and musty smells of old Mac OS code, I sometimes stumble across a particularly sweet smelling OS X application. Actually, I often do. MacUpdate is loaded with the stuff. VersionTracker’s another great place to point your olfactory apparatus. But hey, I’m giving away secrets and you’ll never need to come back here to hear about great software. So forget I said all that.

This week though, I got doubly lucky. I discovered Charcoal Design and two of its great little utilities, the likes of which I’ve dreamed about for ages.

About Charcoal Design
Charcoal Design is “mostly a hobby” of Nick Lockwood, a 25-year-old Mac developer from London. Nick, a web developer by day, has been a Mac user for around 10 years, and has been writing Macintosh software for the last 5 or so.

Nick has recently started to experiment with releasing applications for free, and funding their development via voluntary donations and advertising, so if you like his stuff, send him some cash.

A strong believer and supporter of open source software, Nick believes the harder you try to protect your software from piracy, the more it ends up inconveniencing and annoying your genuine customers. Although, he does point out that he is not an open source Nazi and is equally supportive of developers who want to charge for their software.

For the few commercial applications Charcoal Design does sell, it has adopted a very liberal take on the shareware license, allowing you to run copies on multiple machines and to share your license with friends and family if you so choose. Nick only asks that you don’t you give away your serial numbers to people you don’t know, such as posting them on the internet.

This approach has led to some flack from other developers, but Nick believes that in the 21st century, this is the best way to spread the word about his software. (With the stunning success of other viral marketing campaigns, it’s hard to disagree.)

One other nice thing Charcoal Design does is let you download software as PPC, Intel, or Universal. For those on one system only, this saves disk space as well as bandwidth when downloading.

MagiCal
MagiCal leapt off the virtual software shelf, grabbed me by the eyeballs, and said “Look at me!” And MagiCal is what we’ve all been looking for.

It is the first decent and reasonably priced replacement for the OS X clock in the menubar that I’ve seen. (Okay, there once was another excellent one but it was bought by some other company who put a ridiculous price on it.)

As you can see from the image with this article, it can display not only the time but also the date, and it contains a drop down calendar that lets you change the month and year anywhere forward or back 50 years. What you show in the menubar is very customizable, with a plethora of formats available, plus you can change the color of the text, which I find useful for helping the eye to find and read the time more quickly.

If I could get one feature added, it would be for the mouse to display my appointments and to-dos for a date when I hover it over that day in the calendar.

I gotta say, because Dashboard is so slow, it had been annoying having to go to it to see a calendar.

I can see MagiCal becoming indispensable in no time at all. 9/10

Being impressed with MagiCal, I visited the Charcoal Design site and discovered some other great utilities, but the standout was Shades.

Shades
Hands up for anyone else who has to stick their Mac in a corner of their bedroom. Okay all you young ‘uns, hands down. I just want to see those who share that room with a partner… Quite a few hands still up. And how often has said dear partner complained about the bright screen keeping them awake at night, despite you dimming it as much as you could? (On an iMac that’s not much at all.)

And what about when you want to leave something running overnight? Sure you’re clever and have a screensaver containing one image of nothing but black, but don’t you just wish your Mac gave you more flexibility with its screen dimming?

Enter Shades.

The screen brightness in OS X is stepped—which itself can be an annoyance—and (on iMacs at least) does not go all the way to black.

I suspect Shades works by simply placing a black rectangle over your screen and letting you adjust the opacity. In normal light I found it a bit uneven, but in a dim room it worked excellently.

Shades overlays any other running application, including screensavers. However, it does not overlay Exposé, so if you use it a lot, be prepared to be suddenly blinded when you press F9 or F10 when using Shades.

Shades runs as an application in the Dock, which is a little untidy, but I expect that is so it will function as required. However, it places a slider controller in the menubar that works the same as OS X’s volume control. If the Shades application is selected, it also optionally displays a floating transparent controller.

One thing that I found very useful with dual monitors is that Shades dims both screens, whereas the iMac’s brightness only affects its own screen.

The Shades web page also notes that: “Unlike other solutions, Shades doesn’t change your display settings, and won’t screw up your monitor’s colour profile.”

Shades is a very simple yet useful utility. 9/10

In future releases of MagiCal and Shades, Nick intends on improving support for common standards, and increasing interoperability with other popular Macintosh applications. Nick says he’s had a fantastic response from users who’ve told him exactly what features they want to see in future releases, and he aims to try to match or exceed all those requirements. He says it’s development by democracy, and “that’s really what the Mac is all about.”