Archive for February, 2008

Last week, I reviewed Pomoto, which is a service for uploading and sharing your photos right from your Mac. Thanks to the awesome guys over at Pomoto for giving us 3 one-year subscriptions to give away.

Also, a big thanks to all who participated in the giveaway. The winners of the four licenses are: Jason, Rusty, and Gwen. Congratulations! You guys will be receiving an email with instructions shortly.

Be sure to download the trial version of Pomoto, and pay for it if you find it useful. Stay tuned to the MacApper RSS Feed for more giveaways, or subscribe to the MacApper Podcast to see more video reviews.

Most of us probably rip DVDs from time to time. iTunes can be a very powerful metadata tagger, but for some of us, it is just not powerful enough.

Yes, iTunes has many information fields that you can fill out, but there is still much more information that it does not let you add. For these, there is Lostify.

Lostify is a simple Metadata tagger for M4Vs (videos) and M4As (audio files), the perfect companion for Handbrake. It lets you fill out MCAA rating, Actors, Directors and every other piece of Metadata that iTunes can handle. The best part is that it is free!

Back in the early 80’s, before Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Grunge music and cable television, there existed a paradise of electrons and buttons and beeps. It was a haven where even the dorkiest kid could get some props for beating the high score. For those of us who spent our formative years dropping thousands of quarters into machines at the local arcade, there is a new game that will bring back the romantic days of the twitch-fest.

Sebastiaan de With is a very talented graphic designer, and he often posts some really nice articles on his blog, Cocoia. The other day he posted a mockup of his “Dream Browser,” and now, about a week later, developers have contacted him about making his idea into a real application.

The browser’s main inspiration is the iTunes sidebar. That list includes all of your tabs, bookmarks, RSS feeds, downloads, and more.

Well, folks, it looks like Apple’s really taken their “Tuesday Newsday” philosophy to heart here; yet another major announcement hit the feeds this morning as the new generation of MacBooks was released, along with their beefy brothers the MacBook Pros. This latest iteration of the lean machines is as impressive as ever — displaying a variety of new features on the surface as well as brand new Intel Penryn chips under the lid (as it were).

If you’re using Apple’s latest keyboard, released in August, or if you’re fortunate enough to have a MacBook Air, you’re already enjoying the benefits of dedicated iTunes keyboard buttons.

However, not everyone is so lucky, which is probably why iTunes controller applications are so popular and plentiful.

An iTunes controller is a companion to Apple’s jukebox that allows you to play, pause, skip between tracks and adjust volume using either keyboard shortcuts or buttons in the menu bar. As more people listen to music while surfing the web, with a recent survey by Olswang finding about one in five computer users listen to music on their computers daily, there’s a big market for these apps.

Let’s face it: relationships are complicated things. Between keeping track of personal details, remembering dates, communicating efficiently and more, it’s a small wonder that we manage to get along at all.

And that’s just with personal relationships — what about professional relationships, where sometimes the extent of your contact with an individual is a series of digital transactions?

Jumsoft jumps to the rescue with an update to one of its award-winning pieces of productivity software, aptly named Relationship. This little gem is a piece of customer relationship management software geared towards the small business market. With its attractive price tag and competitive features, it’s easily established itself as a staple of the consumer corporate world, and the 1.1 update brings only improvements to the tried-and-tested formula for success.

I’ve been a long time iPhoto user, but I’ve also been a long time amateur photographer. When Apple introduced Aperture, I was, of course, very interested.

I tried it out, was promptly confused by the interface, and turned off by the price tag. Now Apple has introduced Aperture 2, I thought I’d take another test drive. I’m a happy with iPhoto, so I went into the free trial with a few things in mind.

• What does Aperture have that iPhoto doesn’t?
• What does Aperture not have that iPhoto does?
• Would Aperture be worth the $199?

Tuesdays are nearly always the Apple day of the week. It’s Apple’s release date of choice, and rightly so; it allows stock to be in stores, and hence people’s hands, by the weekend.

But 2008 has been an interesting year, and it all started with a comment at a small event, known as MacWorld from a Mr Steven P. Jobs (ever heard of him, I certainly haven’t):

It’s not often that you find an app that totally changes the way you do a task. As a video blogger for MacApper, I use screen recording software all the time, and never has it been easy to create a beautiful and professional screencast.

Not until ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow from Vara Software takes screencasting software to the next level. With a beautiful and simple interface, ScreenFlow uses all of Leopard’s Core Animation features to the max, providing an environment for you to capture, edit, and output your screencasts with ease.

iDisk used to be the most efficient online file service on the Mac platform, but a new competitor seems to be looming on the horizon. SugarSync allows you to get your files from virtually anywhere.

Previously only compatible with PC and mobile devices, the folks over at SugarSync announced today an alpha release for Mac. SugarSync allows you to upload your files to their service, and then access those files from anywhere with an internet connection and a browser.

Simply put, MacJournal is a tool for journaling and capturing notes. But, MacJournal is more than just a diary. Features such as PDF and image support, password protection, encryption, tagging, full screen mode, and a publish to blog feature make MacJournal a versatile application.

The interface will be familiar to most users. You create a new entry, type the information you wish to capture, and format it as desired. A sidebar displays your various journals, should you want to classify entries under different subjects. There is also a calendar to review entries by date.

With thousands of stars viewable to the naked eye, finding the Pleiades, or even figuring out what that bright star near the horizon is, takes a fair bit of research, unless you have a planetarium at your disposal. Until Apple unveils the iPlanetarium, I’m recommending Stellarium.

Open source app Stellarium is a planetarium for your Mac. Stellarium shows you the stars in a beautiful and fun to play with interface. The only thing that looks better is the real night sky.

No question Macs come with an array of great fonts for almost any project, be it a presentation or a research paper. In fact according to Apple, Mac OS X “includes over $10,000 worth of high quality Roman, Japanese and Chinese fonts”. This is great, but with just a tiny bit of effort, hundreds of high quality free fonts can also be at your disposal.

In just a couple easy steps you’ll have all sorts of fun new fonts to play around with, and you’ll have no more excuses to use Comic Sans or Papyrus.

I’ve got five names here, five people who have won a license to HoudahGEO by just leaving a comment on my review of the product. It’s that easy to win apps that we have giveaways for here on MacApper.

HoudahGEO is a picture geo-coding app that lets you upload manually (and automatically) geo-coded pictures to either Googe Earth or Flickr for viewing on maps.

Here’s the list of people who won:

• molle
• maxim
• J Dott
• Jim
• Andy