Fake App For Mac

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s series. Every day from mid June through July, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program.

Apple recently began cracking down on fake reviews in the App Store, a widespread problem that can affect both App Store rankings and Top Charts. Fake is a new browser for Mac OS X that makes web automation simple. Fake allows you to drag discrete browser Actions into a graphical Workflow that can be run again and again without human interaction.

Visit the for a list of past Mac Gems. Like Automator, () gives AppleScript’s powerful tools a user-friendly graphical interface. But where Automator controls the workings of Mac OS X, Fake lets you script just about anything you do on the Web. At first glance, Fake looks like a fairly simple WebKit-based browser, with tabs containing graphical previews of each page. From a floating pane, you can drag and drop into a space on the right-hand side of the Fake window, creating a custom workflow to handle various online tasks.

Less than 10 minutes after first launching the program, I’d built a simple workflow to run through a specified number of photos in my Flickr library, download each image at its original size, then move to the next. By holding down the Control key and dragging from workflow actions such as Click HTML Link, I could almost magically connect them to specific items on the Web page. Fake was smart enough to know where in the overall HTML framework of the page each element resided; it never lost track of them, even when moving from page to page. Novices can easily assemble tasks like this, or workflows to fill out tedious online forms. For power users, Fake can do even more to test online applications, including executing user-specified JavaScript code, calling outside AppleScripts, and working through if/else/then statements. The program’s documentation covers everything you need to get started, but to master these advanced elements, you’ll need your own programming knowhow. Fake workflows can be saved and reopened, but as yet, there’s no way to export them as AppleScripts.

At nearly $30, Fake may be a little pricey for everyday users, unless boring, wrist-numbing tasks make up the bulk of your Web surfing. But its clever idea and smooth execution definitely make Fake a great, time-saving investment for serious Web coders.

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[ Nathan Alderman is an extremely lazy writer and copy editor in Alexandria, Va.].

For users who perform advanced Web tasks, manually tracking pages can be time-consuming. Those users may find the automated functioning of Fake for Mac useful.

However, regular users looking for a simple browser should look elsewhere. Vpn clients for mac free. Fake for Mac offers a free trial version, but its limitations and restrictions are unknown. The full version requires a $29.95 payment. While there was no native installer, the program downloaded and completed setup as expected.