For your eyes only...

Everyone of us create certain personal files that we do not wish to share with others. We do not wish someone to accidentally access the files while they were using your machine and happened to click on them.


How can you hide those folders from prying eyes? We got an app from Nova Media, a company that specialises in Mobile Data Solutions ( http://ubermask.org/en/novamedia-about.html ) The app seemed on first use a very ordinary app, like any other app that would hide your folders, you can hide your folders. An additional feature of this app was that even Spotlight cannot find the existence of this folder while it is hidden. So... whats so great?

I let it be on our system for a while and then one evening, I tried to see what it can do... I finally read (I kind of skip messages that pop up) that it has registered two hot keys, one to hide and one to unhide. The reason I could not understand this app for a while was the fact that on start-up you see a GUI window that looks like a place to add files (since there is no add button, I presume that the only way to add is drag and drop), that worked, The folder disappeared off my desktop. YAY!! I can now hide the folders, I double-clicked on the entry and hey, it is back on my desktop. So I can now hide it and unhide it.

Now that I can see it in the window and I want to hide it again, what do I do? The little mask icon in the entry did not help much, it would indicate if the folder/file was hidden or not, so by clicking on that one can unhide, but not hide. I was stuck at this point. I was going to give up on the app as another app that just claims to do what other apps can do in bits and pieces.

Then I read the Help (RTFM is not just an abbreviation, it is a very essential part of any process) that pops up with the Information button, and tried the hotkeys, it worked, the app is meant to work with the hot keys to hide/unhide but use the UI to Add more files and folders (the developer calls it managing)

Now to start and access the application, it asks for the admin password (reminded me a bit of the UAC on Vista), so be assured that no one can casually just run the program and unhide your files. However the hot keys do not ask for a password, that is a bit of a security let down, what if someone knew that I had Ueber mask on my system, and since I have already authorised it, they just press the hotkeys and the app provides you the options to restore to the desktop.


The restore works by just restoring the files, so if you do not know where the files were in the first place, you cannot find them that easily. The only way is to use the app's GUI for which you have to enter the password, so if you work with this in mind, you shall be quite safe from accidental hacks.

UPDATE: One more thing is that the hotkey combinations can be set to the users liking. So, they do not have to go with the default combination. The GUI is required as mentioned earlier only to manage the files. One can alternatively highlight the files and press the hotkey combination and hide the files without invoking the GUI interface.

One things that always intrigued me, was in many of the screencasting apps, I can either hide all the desktop icons or none, how do they manage to get only a few icons on the screen? Then I figured that creating or loggin into a guest account will give you a clean desktop to start with. If you do not want to do any such thing, you can also hide the folders on the desktop with Ueber Mask and just have a few icons/folders that you want to work with.

So if hiding folders/files from prying eyes is not your thing, you can use this for screencasting, if that is also not your thing, well, take our word for it, this is a useful utility, and try to get a free copy, read on and you will know how to get a free copy for yourself.

Overall this is a stable, nice product that does what it says, if you do wish to save your files from prying eyes and hands in your office, at home then this is your app, Ueber mask.


Summary
Software : Über Mask
Version : 1.1
Publisher : Nova Media
Website : http://ubermask.org/
Platform : Mac OS X (10.6.x or higher)
Demo : 14 days
Price : € 9.95

And we have more than one copy of UeberMask for our lucky readers, all you need to do
1. Follow @whatsin4me
2. Retweet "To win a copy of Ueber mask, follow @whatsin4me and RT this message "

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