Jeff Butts

If you’re looking for a speaker system for your iOS device that’s as comfortable outdoors as it is indoors, the Braven 625s is an excellent option to consider. Jeff Butts took the speaker camping, and found it to be an excellent modern addition to his family’s primitive campground site.

As schools integrate emerging technology into the classroom, a challenge emerges to properly leverage the technology without sacrificing the educational merits of the curriculum. In this installment of Mac in the Classroom, Jeff Butts looks at how one school dealt with these challenges by getting into the app development business.

Jeff Butts is a self-avowed file hoarder, hanging on to downloads from more than five years ago. While hard drives are getting less expensive and more expansive, a drive with duplicates can get bogged down and slow. Even more importantly, SSD drives are short on space and long on cost, making it important to clean up duplicate files from time to time. Enter Gemini: The Duplicate Finder for OS X.

Jeff Butts is a file hoarder, keeping just about every file he’s ever downloaded. When he wants to find a particular file, he usually arranges files by date to find the most recent copy. In Snow Leopard, he was used to the “Arrange by Date” contextual menu, but OS X Lion has changed how that looks. In this Quick Tip, Jeff shows how to coax OS X Lion to give the same user experience of arranging files by date as in Snow Leopard.

Apple has had a place in the class room for years — even before the first Macintosh computer was released — and the iPad’s versatility has the company in an even stronger position in the education market. Jeff Butts is digging into the education options that go along with Apple’s products, and he takes a look at the end of Encyclopedia Britannica’s print era, too.

In OS X Lion, Apple has added several “data detectors” that work alongside Mail to make your Mail more interactive. In this TMO Quick Tip, Jeff Butts shows how to track your packages right from Mail.

Apple released Apple Configurator this week, a new tool designed to allow corporate and enterprise IT departments to manage fleets of Apple devices. Enterprise IT staff have bemoaned the lack of better tools to manage fleets of iOS devices, and some recent government migrations to the iPhone and iPad have made it clear that a better solution was needed for managing these devices en masse—Apple Configurator is intended to meet that need.

The Karotz Smart Rabbit is a PC- and Mac-compatible gadget that brings a variety of fun and useful apps into a small, entertaining form factor. You can control your smart rabbit using your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. Through a web page interface, you can load up your Karotz with applications from an “Appz Store” that, while small, is growing daily and is open for developers to do business.

Simplify, by Pixel Mates, provides a full-featured mini-player and desktop widget for iTunes, Rdio, and Spotify. The app makes it easy to control your music playback even when you have many applications filling your desktop real estate.

A favorite utility for cleaning up Windows PCs, Piriform’s CCleaner, is now available for the Mac. The app provides a variety of system optimization capabilities for OS X, all wrapped up in a single interface.