Archive for August, 2007

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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 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.

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?

There’s no doubt, Apple loves us students! That’s why Apple offers great deals to individuals enrolled in post-secondary education. These deals include giving students a very generous discounts off of an annual desktop and/or laptop purchase and discounted Apple Developer Connection memberships.

Needless to say, this comes as a very welcome perk for those of us spending all of our money buying texts and all our time studying them. While Apple’s student discounts are offered year-round, we are currently in the season of an even more exciting and limited time discount being offered to University, College and other post-secondary students: Buy a Mac, get a free iPod Nano.

I’m a sucker for Apple products. As soon as Apple introduced the keyboard (and updated iMacs), I took out the credit card and bought a new Apple wired keyboard. I wasn’t really in need of a keyboard, especially since I use a MacBook, but that was the reason I decided to purchase it.

The MacBook’s keyboard has been a controversial subject among the Mac community, some love it and some hate it. At first, I hated the Macbook keyboard; I felt the keystrokes were too short and the keys were too far apart, but within about a week, I really liked and prefer the keyboard to others. The new Apple keyboard has been an instant must-have after using (and loving) the Macbook keyboard.

When I saw a reminder this morning, notifying me of an update ForkLift 1.0, I was expecting several minor features and bug fixes. After all, it was just a point release. Boy was I in for a surprise; a big surprise.

For the uninitiated, ForkLift is a very capable file manager from the developers at BinaryNights. Personally, I use ForkLift all the time; I don’t even touch the Finder anymore because of several major annoyances that I can’t live with.

One of the best things about OS X is that it is easy to customize. Everything from you desktop picture to the skin of an application can be changed to suit your liking if you have the right tools. One of my favorite was to change my Mac’s overall appearance is changing icons.

The reason that I like changing my Mac’s icons is that it gives my Mac a “personality.” With the right icons, you can change the whole look of your system, and make it more tailored toward you. The only problem I find with icons, is finding ones that “feel right” for me.

If you prefer having an ever-changing desktop wallpaper, looking for new images can get really annoying. DeskLickr from Aaron Wallis solves this problem by interfacing with the photo sharing website Flickr; it automatically downloads and displays new desktop images.

DeskLickr can grab a variety of photos from Flickr for your desktop. You can choose to get your images from the DeskLickr group, Flickr’s “interestingness” photos, a tag search, or even your very own photo stream, favorites, or groups. You have the option to choose a random image or the latest image as well as the frequency of desktop change. The program will even show you a window with information about your current picture.