![]() To block your camera, you need to authenticate as an administrator and restart your computer. In these days of hackers being able to take control of webcams, this seems like a swell tool to include. I know QuickTime can do this but if Parallels Toolbox is right there, maybe this is easier.īut the Camera tool in Parallels Toolbox has another BIG trick up its sleeve – it can entirely block your camera. I was able to change it to my Cinema Display or my Logitech C920 webcam. It defaults to your built-in camera, but if you tap on the gear to flip the app over, you can change the audio source and the camera to anything you have available on your system. Have you ever just wanted to take a picture or a video with your computer’s camera? With Parallels Toolbox that’s at your fingertips. ![]() If it stored the password for encrypted archives maybe it would be, but opening a menu bar app to drag a file onto it, is a lot more work than just double clicking the zip file. Pretty cool if you like to make encrypted zip files. That password will be your password for everything you encrypt going forward until you change it, and the password stays on by default going forward. The Archive tool has an option on the back in settings to apply a password if you want to encrypt. The Archive tool opens up with an area where you can drag in a file or folder to compress into a zip file. ![]() If you want to encrypt as you create the archive, you’ll go through a bit more shenanigans. To uncompress that archive, simply double click the zip file. If you want to make a compressed version of a file or folder on the Mac, it’s as easy as right clicking and selecting compress, causing a zip file to appear next to your original content. It might be my imagination but it seems way faster at unmounting my backup drive than Mountain. Mountain also will remount volumes with a single click, but Parallels Toolbox doesn’t have that feature. But this sledge hammer approach might not have the finesse Kenneth or you seek. I happen to like that because my main use case is when I want to undock my laptop to move it somewhere else. Where Mountain lets you choose which volumes to unmount, Parallels Toolbox’s Eject Volumes ejects all of them at once. Let’s jump right to the one thing Kenneth wanted, the ability to eject volumes right from the menu bar. Let’s walk through the tools in Parallels Toolbox and see if we can find enough tools in here to make it worth that vast sum for you. I want you to keep that number in your head as I describe what Parallels Toolbox can do, and see if you think it’s worth 83¢ per month. But when you think about it, $10 per year is not that much money. I know, I know, I didn’t like the idea at first either. You can’t outright buy Parallels Toolbox, you have to pay $10 per year to use it. But I want you to promise me you’ll listen/read this through before counting it out. I’m going to tell you one thing that will make you not want to check out Parallels Toolbox. Each tool is slightly different, but for all of them you configure the tool by tapping a gear in the upper right which flips over the floating window to reveal settings. If you hit command-tab while you have one of these floating windows open, you can see the app in the app switcher. Most of the tools in the Toolbox open their own little floating window, which is an actual app. ![]() Many of the apps inside the Toolbox provide functions that can be done by other individual apps, but Parallels Toolbox piles them altogether into one clean, standardized interface. Where Mountain is a socket wrench, this really is a whole toolbox full of tools. You can find Parallels Toolbox at /… Parallels Toolbox is a menu bar app but rather than doing one thing well, it does a ton of things well. It’s called Parallels Toolbox and it’s made by the fine folks who make the Parallels virtual machine software. The good news is that Dave Hamilton mentioned in the Mac Geek Gab Cool Stuff Found segment a tool that might be able to replace Mountain and do a whole lot more. Not saying it’s guaranteed but at least that won’t be a limiter.īut I get Kenneth’s concern. It’s a 64-bit app, so it’s potentially good through High Sierra and the OS beyond that. That said, Mountain still works, and it’s in the Mac App Store for $5.99. Kenneth was asking about replacing it because the app hasn’t been updated since 2012 and had gotten a little bit glitchy for him. It sits in your menu bar and gives you instant access to mount or unmount physical and network volumes. Mountain is a perfect example of Tim Verpoorten’s “does one thing and does it well” menubar app. Listener Kenneth Taylor wrote in asking if I had found a replacement for a little menu bar app I’d recommended called Mountain.
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