Archive for June, 2008

When it comes to organization, one of the most simple things you can do to organize data is create an outline. OmniOutliner is an application that allows you to create an outline without hindering your thought process. Many of you have probably heard of OmniOutliner and may even have it on your Mac if you bought a MacBook when Apple was packaging OmniOutliner with them.

The main window of OmniOutliner is quite minimal, opting to have many of the formatting control etc., in an inspector. This makes for a very clean and distraction free window with only 5 buttons (7 in the pro version). The inspector has 5 parts to it, Appearance, Row, Column, Document and Style Attributes, each with it’s own options for editing an element of your outline.

The goal behind Firefox was simple: a lightweight browser with the basics for a satisfying Web surfing experience, but the groundwork for a user to customize their feature set by installing add-ons. On the other end of the spectrum is Flock. Out of the box Flock can do just about everything you can imagine you might possibly (one day) use, and a little more.

A few weeks ago I reviewed an application called Flux, which is a website creation tool using the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) concept. Shortly after the review was published, we had a 3 license giveaway, and today we have the winners (randomly chosen) of that giveaway.

The winners were:
Simon
Phillz
John Wells

The winners have been notified.

Thanks you for your comments, and stay tuned for future giveaways.

As you may remember me saying at the beginning of my review of Flux, I am a big fan of the WYSIWYG concept (What You See Is What You Get). It was RapidWeaver that originally introduced me to the concept, back when I received a license as part of the original MacHeist bundle.

Since v3.6 (the last version, reviewed by myself on MacApper), RapidWeaver has undergone a major Leopard overhaul (as a free upgrade) to improve on everything from interface to publishing.

There are many image editors available for Mac, but most of them use many palettes, which many people don’t prefer. Recently Iris was released, which is a one-window image editor that looks a lot like Apple’s Aperture. It combines all the elements of a image editor into one clean window.

We at MacApper are big fans of Fluid, the Site-Specific Browser (SSB) creator application from Todd Ditchendorf. This handy little app, which we’ve discussed before, allows you to take your favorite websites and turn them into applications in and of themselves. Basically, you get a fully functioning browser without all the clutter of toolbars and icons of your conventional browser (although you can get that stuff back if you want it). However, with the latest version of Fluid 0.9.2, a couple of new very useful features have been added. In this MacApper tutorial I’ll be explaining how you can create your very own SSB, which you can choose to put in your Menubar as a menubar item or actually on your desktop. Click on after the jump to see how to get started.

For the past month I’ve been privately testing Evernote, a feature rich note-taking application. I don’t normally glean much enjoyment from closed betas, as the apps often have too many bugs to be practical. I find myself least trusting of notes apps because it’s never wise to devote my most important information to untested software that’s liable to implode at any time, taking all of my data with it.

Firefox 3 released to much fanfare Tuesday with millions of downloads, earning the browser a place in the record books — literally. Firefox achieved the Guinness World Record for most downloads in a day. Excitement for the software launch bordered on the ridiculous, with thousands of people attending and hosting Firefox 3 launch parties. But behind all the hype, there really is a great deal of substance. Firefox 3 is fast, stable and packed with features.

As you have probably noticed, we have not posted any articles in the past few days. This was due to a server issue with our back end. The problem has been solved and we are ready to go! Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Last week, at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple announced the 2008 Apple Design Award winners. The winner for best student project was Squirrel, a new finance management application. Although there are many other financial applications for Mac OS X, Squirrel has a great design which helps make the application very user friendly.

So you want to become organized, or at least more organized. You can start by using iCal for events, and maybe iCal or Things for to-dos. But what about one small and lightweight place for both of them? This is exactly what Second Gear’s Today does for us.

If you have ever wanted to keep track of your media on your Mac (Books, DVDs, CDs, etc.), then you have most likely heard of Delicious Library. Two weeks ago, Delicious Library, from Delicious Monster, has received a major upgrade, going from v1.6 to v2.0. Delicious Library 2 takes advantage of many Leopard-only technologies, that aim to build upon the success of Delicious Library v1.0.

Recently, one passion of mine that has really taken over my spare time is photography. I have been interested in photography for some time now, but earlier this year I really stepped it up by purchasing a DSLR (a Nikon D40 to be exact). I am the type of person who learns by doing, so I purchased this camera not knowing what Aperture, Shutter Speed or what an 18-55mm lens was. These are all terms that I have learned since my purchase, but one term that I only recently started to research is HDR.

With the introduction of the latest iteration of Mac OS X Leopard, Apple also changed the visual appearance of your Mac’s main application launcher, the Dock. Since Leopard has been on sale, people have started to take advantage of the new way that the Dock is controlled, including tweaking Dock images and controlling what the Dock looks like. Numerous different apps have sprung up to make Dock switching easier, and one of my favorites is the aptly titled Dock Library.

If you write for, or maintain a blog, you know how tedious it can be to fiddle with the online interfaces while writing. If you write for multiple blog, this tediousness is compounded. For this reason, developers have created desktop blogging clients.

Of the people that I have spoken with, many prefered the likes of MarsEdit and Ecto. I was thinking about getting one of these to use myself, when I came across a client called Blogo that I thought I would give a try.