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iStat Menus 6 from Bjango is a terrific update to an essential Mac utility. This update brings a host of new options on how to display information about the performance of your Mac. New colors, new icons, new graphs; it's all about tailoring to your needs.

In this update show, Allison Sheridan will demonstrate the new features that have been added since her tutorial from July 2015, SCOM0513.

You'll learn about the enhanced options in tracking CPU/GPU performance, memory management, disk speed, network speed, thermal sensors, battery and power, including connected Bluetooth devices, date and time, and an entirely new section providing local weather.

The folks at Bjango have even added notifications to alert you of problems such as a process that has been chewing up too much CPU for too long, a sensor that's reading high temperatures, or if your disk is getting dangerously full.

Allison will also demonstrate a pair of utilities (iStat Server and iStat View) that allows you to monitor the computers (Macs, PCs or Linux boxes) on your network. This can be done from either an iOS device or a Mac.

Many apps are embracing a subscription-based pricing model, which is great for developers but can cause subscription fatigue for consumers. MacPaw (the developers of CleanMyMac and Gemini) have a different idea: a service that provides developers with a predictable income stream while limiting the number of subscriptions that consumers have to pay for each month.

That service is called SetApp, and it has been described as the "Netflix for quality Mac apps."

Ulysses is a fantastic plain text editor for the Mac, iPad and iPhone. It allows you to create plain text documents or “sheets” and use markdown formatting to control the final look and format of your writing. PDF, ePub, HTML, Text, DOCX and even publishing to Medium are all included in this great app, giving you ultimate control of your writing.

As well as a wealth of formatting and exporting capabilities, Ulysses takes away the pain of managing your documents across all your devices. All your sheets are contained in a single Ulysses library, that syncs amazingly well with iCloud. It will even allow you to edit external files from a multitude of sources.

Please note that Ulysses has moved to a subscription service as of August 2017

Ulysses is a fantastic text editor for the Mac, iPad and iPhone. It allows you to create plain text documents or “sheets” and use markdown formatting to control the styling of your documents, allowing you to export them in a multitude of formats. 

It's really simple to export to PDF, ePub, HTML, Text, DOCX and even publish direct to Medium from the Mac, iPad or iPhone. 

As well as the wealth of formatting and exporting capabilities, Ulysses takes away the pain of managing your documents across all your devices. All your sheets are contained in a single Ulysses library, that syncs amazingly well with iCloud. It will even allow you to edit external files from a multitude of sources.

This first episode focuses on the basic principles of Ulysses and we will follow up in the next episode with a look at some of its more advanced features.

Update: As of August 2017, Ulysses has changed to a subscription model.

Home Inventory is an easy to use application that allows you to rapidly build a catalogue of all your possessions, or keep track of your various collections of "stuff".

In conjunction with two free iOS helper apps, Home Inventory takes the friction out of building a personal database of all your belongings, to help you stay organised and give you peace of mind! Highly rated on the Mac App store, Home Inventory has previously been a Mac App Store Editors' Choice and a Mac App Store Best of 2013 pick.

Following on from this week's Mac show, Allison Sheridan takes us through two free iOS helper applications for "Home Inventory" on the Mac.

Home Inventory Remote Photo - To capture barcodes and images of items to transfer into your Home Inventory application.

Mobile Backup - To back up your Home Inventory database to your iOS device.

?Imagine an application that’s both a Finder replacement and a super fast File Transfer application supporting a multitude of industry standard protocols. An application that also allows you to mount remote file systems just like local drives, synchronises between drives, allows for in place editing of remote files and has a bundle of other really useful utilities that you’d usually expect to find in separate packages. Well, imagine no longer as ForkLift 2 has been released and is all these things.... and more!

This week, I take a look at a technique that's received a lot of kudos in both education and business and that's mind mapping.

This week's show takes you through the basics of mind mapping on the Mac using an application called MindNode Pro.

I take a look at the basic concepts and show you how to use MindNode Pro to create beautiful mind maps.

Many mind mapping tools produce pretty ugly maps but MindNode Pro is very ""Mac like"" in that it allows you to produce very clean and elegant mind maps.