Archive for April, 2007

Alright MacAppers we are in the closing stretch to get your contest submissions in for the Switcher’s Giveaway. Over the last 24 hours we saw a couple dozen high quality entries come in, using some creative ideas I never would have thought of. Wow guys I am amazed! Another thing I think is cool is that we have received submissions from several non-English speaking locales including India, Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, Iceland, Viet Nam, China, and Thailand.

Have you ever wanted an easy way to create an upbeat playlist for exercising or a softer, more relaxed one to fit your mood? If so, Tangerine! is your program of choice!

Tangerine!, published by Potion Factory, is an intelligent iTunes playlist creator. Tangerine! works by analyzing the BPM (beats per minute) and the beat intensity of your songs, allowing you to create a playlist with songs of similar tempos. Tangerine! integrates very well with iTunes, allowing you to load and save playlists, import album art, and exporting the BPM data to iTunes. It also automatically analyzes your new songs. While the program is very efficent at analyzing your music library, it currently can not analyze songs purchased from the iTunes store due to DRM, but they are working on a fix for this. Luckily, so is Apple!

We all know how to screen capture on the Mac by now, but what if you need to capture an entire web page that doesn’t fit on your display. The answer to this simple question would be Paparazzi!.

Paparazzi! is a small application that can capture any web page from top to bottom, and save it to any size or format. Paparazzi! really is the missing piece to Apple’s Grab application, and should be included inside Mac OS X Leopard this fall. Paparazzi! also includes all your Safari bookmarks, has the ability to capture at any size, and will also allow you to crop your screenshot to your specifications. Once you have captured a screenshot with Paparazzi, you can easily save the file into a range of formats for convenient use. That’s all there is to it.

We’ve all had times when our Macs are acting a little funky, and it can be frustrating when a problem just won’t go away. Here are the steps I go through when things get messed up. This might not be the same procedure fore everyone but it has worked the treat for me several times now.

Note: Take precautions when working with a sick machine. By all means backup your data whenever possible before beginning.

X-Moto is a game I found, while searching around for something to waste my time with. It supports Mac, Windows, and Linux. The Mac version seems to always be a bit behind the other two, but I was playing with the new version 0.2.7, and I am quite impressed.

It is definitely on its way to becoming a great game and there was a huge tech leap between the last version and this one. New textures, sounds, levels, less bugs, and more. I guarantee, once you start playing, you can’t quit until you have played at least 30 minutes. X-Moto sucks away your time, but it sure is a fun ride.

There are many options available for launching applications on Macs. You could get another application suited for the job such as Overflow or LaunchBar, or go the manual route of opening up your applications folder, and searching for it. I’ve tried several of these types of applications before, but the one I found the most Mac-like was Trampoline.

Trampoline is a bit of an unusual app. It puts a fresh spin on application launching. Instead of presenting the applications to you in a list or chart, it has them spread out around the edge of a circle. To launch an app, all you do is move your mouse into that application’s area and click. The window disappears and the application opens.

Remember the MacHeist bundle? It included 10 great apps and cost around $50. On May 1st, the MacHeist bundle could be overshadowed by The Mac Pak. The Mac Pak is another software bundle that has been put together by Mark Howson, the man who began MacAppaDay. Mark says that the bundle will be released on the first of May, and the price will begin at $30 for ten games and applications. Then, each day the price will rise, so you will want to buy quickly if you are interested. I found some facts on the MacPak twitter that sounded very enticing to me:

Don’t try to hide it — we know you brag about your huge Downloads folder to your online buddies every single day. You know exactly how many gigabytes you have, and probably how many actual bits that translates to. But you want to know more, you say? Well, WhatSize can help.

WhatSize is a neat little tool that can tell you exactly what’s taking up so much space on your hard drive. Starting from a screen that looks very similar to the column view in Finder, you can drill down and see how big each folder and file on your disk is. This can actually be quite daunting, but WhatSize uses a color-coding system to indicate the comparative size of the files and also sorts them with the biggest ones at the top.

Recording music on a Mac is something that you can do right out of the box. With the set of tools that GarageBand provides, it is quite simple to create a song. djay, however, is not about recording music with instruments, loops etc., but mixing it. At v1.2, the tools that djay provides are pretty basic, but it gets the job done.

iStopMotion from Boinx is one of the most fun and creative Mac applications that I have ever used. This is because it is a digital stop motion capturing app that can produce high quality claymation and time lapse videos. Yep that’s right, you can finally make your very own Gumby and Pokey show, right at home on your Mac.

I finally got around to installing some inline media controls for our bloggers and I thought I might air Alec Feld’s portion of the podcast done over at Victor’s Typical Mac User Podcast, a couple days ago. Alec was interviewed about our Macapper Switcher’s Story Contest and as far as I know this was MacApper’s first foray into anything other than text on a screen. Props to Alec for taking this on and Victor for setting it up. I would highly recommend heading over to TMU to check out the full podcast as it has a great format with a lot of interaction. Victor also has a pretty sweet radio voice.

With the Internet moving more and more towards a full multimedia experience every day, it’s understandable that one of the biggest things people want to spread for the world to see is video. Sure, there are sites like YouTube or MetaCafé that let users easily upload videos, but they don’t offer a lot of control over video size and quality. The real solution for pros is to encode your own video. One great solution for doing this on the Mac is VisualHub.

My biggest whine about OS X was with the Finder. It was simply too inefficient and really slowed me down, especially when working on a MacBook. I thought there was no end to my productivity woes, until I tried ForkLift.

Last month, fellow contributor Jordan Chark previewed ForkLift, where he mentioned some of its great features like dual-panes, remote file previews, and spotlight integration. But there’s a new Beta available, and it comes with 2 new killer features.

For those of you who have an older Mac that doesn’t have Front Row, there is still hope for you. What if I told you there was a way to control your Mac with a Wii remote? All it requires is a Bluetooth supported Mac, a Nintendo Wii Remote (use this if you don’t have a Wii), and a small free application called DarwiinRemote (Direct Link).

You can also configure the remote to control pretty much anything. Interested?

There are plenty of lists with the best Mac applications floating around the web, but some great apps almost aren’t full fledged applications. You’re probably reluctant to plunk down the cash for the ones that cost money, but once you do, they make everyday tasks so effortless, and become so transparent in your workflow, that you couldn’t function without them.