PictureSync: Share Your Photos with the World!
Photography is an avid hobby of mine, and I am sure it is a hobby of many of you readers. When I take a picture that I feel is worth showing to other people, I usually upload it to Flickr. I mostly use Flickr for more creative shots, like landscapes and sunsets, vs. events like birthdays and family get-togethers.
When I want to share the latter, I use Facebook. I am not a real avid user of Facebook, using it mostly for sharing pictures with family whos head would begin to spin if I tried to explain to them the concepts of using Flickr. The only problem I find with using two different services, is when I want to upload the same photo to both.
gDisk: iDisk With a “g!”
When .Mac was first released, it was something that some were wishing for. After purchasing it, you received special promotions, an email address, your own website, and many other neat things.
One of the many great perks that came with getting a .Mac account is the iDisk. The iDisk can be thought of as a virtual hard drive. Dragging files into the iDisk creates a backup by moving them to a server based hard drive, keeping your senstitive data not only centralized but safe from local disk crashes and other folly.
What do you do if you’re too cheap to buy a .Mac account?
5 Productivity Boosting Mac Apps
One of the many things people strive for during a normal day is productivity. Being productive is something that benefits you greatly. And you who hates being productive, let me know how that is working for you. Not getting any work done each day must really be helping you get places. Applications to keep you focused have been featured here before, but I would like to give you my take on it.
How To Get Windows Mobile and Mac OS X On a Date
The Apple iPhone has been released into the wild for quite sometime now, and boy, it has since become a wet dream for every Mac fan boy alive, including me. Unfortunately, almost the rest of the world still can’t get their hands on it.
Until this sexy device makes its way into the Indonesian market (congratulations to those of you who live in US and Europe), or is unlocked, I guess I’ll just have to settle with my Windows Mobile-based PDA phone. Yes, it still maintains the well known reputation of happily-crashing-every-now-and-then.
Nice Player: The Best Looking Video Player on Mac OS X
Many say the only video player you need on Mac OS X is VLC, which I wholeheartedly agree with. Having said that I am really starting to appreciate Nice Player, an application designed from the ground up by people who enjoy watching movies.
What I like in a video player is an unobtrusive video window first and then support for as many file formats as possible; Nice Player fits the bill on both accounts. Here’s what you need to know.
ForkLift 1.1 Winners
Last week, we reviewed ForkLift 1.1, the file manager that just keeps getting better. Featuring Droplets, live-editing, batch renaming and seamless handling of archives, it’s become the default file manager for lots of people.
We asked our readers to come up with great features they’d like to see in upcoming versions of ForkLift. Most of theresponses we received were really impressive, but like all competitions, we only have limited copies to giveaway. Here are the best three:
Tutorial: Quartz Composer Part 2 – How to Make a Quartz Composer Screen Saver
Our last tutorial’s picture viewer, while pretty cool, wasn’t useful for too much more than just viewing images within Quartz Composer. This time, we’ll take your great QC skills and use them to break our creations free from Quartz Composer and into the rest of the Mac OS X environment.
In our last Quartz Composer tutorial, a tour through exciting QC concepts such as displaying images, layers, mouse input and using the Math Patch, we learned how to create a reactive and visually appealing composition in just minutes. This time we’ll make a great MacApper RSS screensaver while we discuss concepts such as making a really cool visual particle generator, controlling your Composition’s attributes from the screen saver preference panel and using macros from other Quartz Compositions.
Liquid Mac: A New Use for Your SMS
Did you know that Apple’s MacBooks, MacBook Pros and some of the later PowerBook G4s have a little accelerometer built-in? Dubbed the “Sudden Motion Sensor”, this nifty little device is capable of detecting how the notebook is accelerating relative to the earth.
So you might be wondering, what’s the point of having such a device in a notebook? It turns out, Apple uses this to protect the movable parts in a hard drive during a fall. When the sensor detects sudden acceleration, it parks the read heads in the hard drive, minimizing potential damage.
Typeset: See Your Fonts, Make Them Shine
Typeset is a brave little application that takes on a particularly interesting challenge. That challenge is being a partner/replacement for Apple’s Font Book. It has often been said, that as a indie developer, it’s dangerous to make software that might be stepped on.
Sure, you might be able to compete with other indie software companies, but when it’s the mighty Apple that we’re talking about, boy will it be rough (see Cabel’s experience). Yet competing on Apple’s turf is exactly what Typeset has done, and I think they’ve done a good job of it.
Pastor: Easy Password and Serial Key Storage
Are you a person who uses the same password over and over again because you totally hate losing access to websites and your mail account? Well we all know this isn’t the best and safest practice. If your all-purpose password is compromised, you can be in a lot of trouble.
Apple has its own built in “Keychain Access” for storing website passwords, which is a really great app that will automatically store and retrieve browser and other application passwords. Only thing is if you want to store and retrieve a password manually, it isn’t that convenient to use. So what’s a good and free alternative?
