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Lighthead Software has been kind enough to provide us with 3 licenses to give away to lucky MacApper readers. To enter, simply add a comment below with a feature that you would like to see in Papaya.

The winners will be chosen at random in a week’s time.

Conrad
roderick
lh
Ben
Jon Hubartt

The developer has been informed of your emails so expect your licenses shortly!

You may need to partition, erase, restore or simply maintain one. In any of these cases Drive Genius 2 from ProSoft engineering claims it will be your one stop shop for all things disk management. This is a tough claim, especially as Leopard ships with a fairly complete disk management application in disk utility anyway.

Let’s start with the good. This application is one of the most powerful I have used in terms of disc management, maintenance and optimization. The company claims that this is the tool that Apple uses to cure your sick mac at the genius bar, and I can believe them. There is clearly some very heavy duty code behind the scenes. Not only that but it has a huge feature list. You can partition your drive; shred it; gather info on it; initialize it (which is a fancy name for quickly erasing it); duplicate it; perform integrity checks; repair it; rebuild it; verify it; repair its permissions; check its smart status; defrag it; benchtest it; scan its sectors and even directly edit those sectors.

To say it’s feature complete is an understatement. Although it offers a lot that Disk Utility already gives us, it offers a whole lot more besides. As far as I could tell each of these was performed well and efficiently. As I mentioned, the engine of this app has clearly been very well developed. I did not, however, check benchmarks with other disk utilities but it certainly didn’t feel like a slouch.

However, there is one huge downside to this app. That is its interface.

I have a huge problem with over-designed interfaces and this is one such interface. When you start the program you are treated to a 360° view of several icons that all look like drives, with nothing labeled. When you go to hover over one to see what it does, your view point starts to fly towards it. Not quickly, just enough speed to move your mouse cursor away from where you are going to click.

Once zoomed in the names are displayed over the icons, which is great, but if your mouse moves just the slightest bit downwards off an icon you fly out, this time at speed, back to your original camera view. So navigation is slow, inefficient and irritating. More than that, there are more icons tucked behind the camera which you can only access by pressing an arrow, which if you are on one side of the view you can't even see!

This theme of useless, elaborate transitions is continued throughout the interface. Mercifully once in a section you can switch directly to another using a drop-down menu on the toolbar, but when choosing a new item you have to wait for the previous view to fade out and the new one to transition in. I found myself just getting frustrated. I am doing work on a hard drive not playing a computer game. There has been much debate over eye candy and the Mac for a while now; I think in this case it certainly has been taken too far.

Here is the weird thinking that I can't get my head around. This is an app with a very professional feature set, yet its interface feels like a toy. Surely a simple, more functional interface would be more beneficial to the application.

If you are in need of some serious hard drive software then check out Drive Genius and see if it is what you’re after, but be warned — it’s priced at $99.

You can download Drive Genius from the ProSoft Engineering website.

I have spent a while with Flow before it was released and I have begun to build a pretty decent view on the application. It does some things differently from other FTP apps that I believe will ultimately make you decide whether you love it or loath it.

So what does Flow offer that is actually new to the FTP space? Surely it is completely saturated at the moment, right? Well it seems that these are questions the Flow designers have taken to heart when designing the app (and something that the developer spoke about recently in an interview). It is “a fresh approach to an old problem” and that is something that is very apparent as I was reviewing Flow. It felt more like the MarsEdits of this world rather than an FTP application. Its visual footprint is small and it integrates a lot of new Mac OS X features into the application.

We have this new, one-paned interface, which is unlike most FTP apps of today. In Flow there is no more dragging between “your stuff” and “their stuff”; you are now dragging between the Finder and Flow (or vice versa). For me this is brilliant, as it’s what I always did for some reason. Now it just means there is less mess on the screen – I just continue as I was. However, I can see that for some this could potentially be an issue. I don’t see it being a deal breaker, but if someone is very used to using dual-panes it can take quite a while to get out of the habit.

Another addition to Flow is its live editing capability. Here, as opposed to downloading a file, editing it and then re-uploading it to the server, Flow allows you to edit the file on the server itself. Obviously this has its appropriate times and places for use. It is perfect, for example, for tweaking a line of code or the layout on a temporary section of a site. It’s probably not best used live for mission-critical pages.

That being said, the editor is OK, but not particularly full featured. You have the essentials: basic syntax coloring and a live preview. There are no great features here, but one really thoughtful inclusion is the ability to switch the vertical orientation of the preview so you can either have it landscape (pictured) or portrait.

Flow also works hard to integrate new OS X features right into the client. Quicklook being a prime example. It works as you would probably expect it to. Along the bottom of the window there is a Quicklook icon. Click on it (or hit space-bar) and the highlighted item is opened with QuickLook. Of course the files have to be downloaded to be “Quicklooked, so I wasn't initially sure whether it would really be that useful. However, after a bit of use I found myself using it more often than I originally thought. Don't expect to be opening big media files though, but text files (which ends up being most of the contents of the server if you are running a website) open fairly quickly. It also helps that there is an indication when a file has been downloaded and ready for Quicklook at the bottom of the screen; the Quicklook icon is not displayed until the file has been downloaded.

I should also point out that all the files are not automatically pulled down from the server, they are only downloaded if you highlight them in Flow, and even then they are only pulled to a temporary location. So you don't need to worry about your entire website suddenly being downloaded to your HDD when starting Flow.

When Flow was introduced the developer produced some screencasts that clearly displayed Flow having quicker download and upload speeds compared to Transmit. I was fairly amazed at the time, mainly because I assumed that download/upload speeds were mostly dependent on your Internet connection.

Now I am even more amazed to see that it is actually true – there was no trickery involved. I didn't do any serious benchmarking but I did time both Flow and Transmit downloading and uploading a 23MB file. Download-wise, Transmit clocked in at 9 minutes 16 seconds, whereas Flow completed the task in 7 minutes 11 seconds. 2 minutes 5 seconds in that context is a phenomenal difference. In uploading the same file Flow clocked 9 minutes 17 second and Transmit was done in 9 minutes 46. Admittedly, the upload difference wasn’t as great, but with the only difference being the software, it’s pretty impressive.

So some could argue that you might as well buy Flow purely for the better transfer speeds, although I would like to point out that there are plenty of other FTP clients out there, and if you wanted to purchase Flow purely on that basis you would want to see a benchmark of all of these apps to see which was really the fastest. However, for my money there is a lot more to Flow that would warrant a purchase other than speed.

The interface is one of those key factors when deciding whether Flow is for you. They claim that Flow presents “a gorgeous, yet tasteful user interface and I am inclined to agree with them. As I mentioned earlier, this feels much more like a modern day “Mac app rather than an ancient FTP client – something that I, personally, love about this application.

It has a clear layout and one that any Mac user would be instantly at home with; it has the familiar sidebar and toolbar layout that is becoming a great standard for new applications.

Sitting on the toolbar is a lot of functionality, however I am not sure how I feel about the toolbar icons. For a start, it uses a Safari icon for “View the selected item in your default browser. Am I the only person who thinks that using a Safari icon for “your default browser is just wrong? I am a Camino/Webkit Nightly user and I did start wondering whether that was an “open in Safari button. Surely the icon of your current browser (something that Adium does really well) would be much better suited to the functionality of the button.

My eyes were then drawn to the rest of the icons and they seemed fine other than “Move and “New Folder (pictured).

Although perfectly clear, there seems to be something not very Mac-like about them. I am no icon critic so it was interesting that I would suddenly think that – in fact, I have never had that impression before. It would be interesting to see how other people react to them. In any case, it had no real impact on the usability of the application.

A handy addition (although not exactly new) to the interface is the addition of tabs. These work pretty much as expected, but I wish they worked with the sidebar as links do in most web browsers. I found myself cmd+clicking in the expectation that the connection would be made in a new tab. However, that is not the case. Not a game-breaker, but it would have been a nice inclusion.

When browsing your server you have a small preview section down at the bottom of your window. A simple and useful addition to the interface, it just reduced the amount of “mouse miles I had to travel to find out the information I needed – there was a lot available to me at a glance.

The section that most people will be spending some time in is the “Transfers section of the application. Something, again, where the interface and engine in Flow really excel.

The interface is simple and clear. It only takes a glance for you to know the status of all your transfers. It presents the information cleanly and keeps it simple, displaying your transfer data in the same window, unlike some applications. In my opinion it is a very tidy way of dealing with it.

In case you couldn't tell I really like Flow and it has won a well-deserved place on my dock. It has delivered on its promise and, as a 1.0, it is an amazing platform for the application to grow and mature into a Mac gem. Whether it's right for you, however, depends a lot on personal preference (doesn't every app?). It certainly brings something new to a well worn application market. Is it a Transmit killer? Time will tell, but this certainly has a better chance than anything I have seen up until now.

Flow is $29 and can be found at the Extendmac website.

Extendmac have graciously provided us with 5 Flow licenses to give away to lucky MacApper readers. To be in with a chance of winning simply add a comment below with the feature that you would most like to see in Flow. The winners will be announced in a followup post next week.

Rees Maxwell – Rees had the great idea of adding a preview as the image was being exported so you could see what effect the different export settings would have on your image map. Great idea Rees, I think this should be a feature in a lot of apps!

Yong Hwee – Young wanted to see integration with online photo services with one click exports and proper tagging.

Bill W – Bill wanted to see the ability to trigger multiple image maps in one – wow.

Justin Goodman – Animated GIFs with different links per frame would just be too cool.

Jonathan Bloom – Built in FTP might be considered bloat, but one click up-loads would be really handy.

Thanks everyone who participated, RAGE will be in contact with the winners shortly. Please stay tuned for more great reviews and giveaways!

I won’t make a secret of the fact that the launch could have gone a lot better and the response wasn’t 100% positive. But, instead of being totally negative, it was clear what people wanted: stronger encryption, as well as a couple of other features such as a confirmation field for when you enter your password.

So for this release I am proud to announce the fact that we have upgraded all of the algorithms. We now offer: 256 Bit AES, 256 Bit Serpent and 448 Bit Blowfish. All are backwards compatible and operate at the same blazing speed that you found with the older, weaker algorithms. Along with the algorithms there is now the option to confirm your password once you have typed it once, avoiding encrypting a file with a password that you won’t remember. This is along with numerous bug fixes and optimizations.

Thats not all the good news as I can finally offer you readers a discount in the form of a coupon code. Check-out with the coupon code MACAPPER to save 15% on your order of BitClamp licenses.

The update is available now through BitClamp’s auto-update or from main site.

Essentially image mapping is adding different links to different parts of an image that you select, which link to something relevant. For example, if there is a particular building in an image you could make it so when someone clicks it, it takes the user to the building's website.

However, to accomplish the effect, you need to be a bit of a wizard with HTML/Javascript. This is the problem: it is essentially a very visual task so it’s much harder to accomplish through code than say a graphical editor. RAGE MapDesign is such an editor, and it does the job beautifully. Its best feature is its simplicity; here is the main interface window and its hovering inspector:

As you can see it’s a simple toolbar based design and I can find no fault with its interface. The inspector is a great way to add links to your shapes as well as effects, although the effect choices are limited to highlight and raising a picture. There is a nice preview button that, when pressed, shows a dynamic preview of what your image map would look like in a browser, which gives you some reassurance that the end product is what you are expecting.

I have a couple of gripes with the shape editor, like how just clicking somewhere with one of the tools selected adds a tiny polygon as opposed to ignoring it until it is dragged, but this is minor. Any complaints are more than made up for by the outstanding export feature which allows you to export the map with a variety of image types and qualities as well as a choice between basic HTML or a hybrid of HTML and CSS (if you have effects on your map you need CSS).

Again, simple but functional, as well as flexible. With this you can place the map anywhere you like on your site. Overall, MapDesign is an outstandingly simple program that does one thing, and does it really well; I am struggling to fault it. If you need an image map created, or think that it would make a good addition to your site, have a look at MapDesign; you may just find you can have it done in 5 seconds flat.

MapDesign is shareware and available for $19.95 at the RAGE software website. The good news is that 5 of you lucky readers won’t have to part with your cash as RAGE has very kindly given us 5 licenses to give away.

To enter all you have to do is comment on this post with a feature that you would most like to see in RAGE MapDesign. Entries will close at 10PM EST on 5th December. Good Luck!

Like so many other areas, screencasting is dominated by one or two apps (namely, iShowU and SnapZPro). I was therefore thrilled to see an announcement by the Araelium Group saying that they had developed an application to compete in this growing market.

My first impressions were not great. The interface is far from spectacular, especially compared to iShowU, and there are some bizarre design choices. For example, the main window is a floating one. So whenever I want to set up a screencast I cannot do anything else without the window being in the way.

So say I get an email. I have to close the window to read it, and then open it back up again when I’m done. This may not sound like much, but it gets really irritating after a while. Other things like whenever I press the shortcut combination (I don’t know whether this will happen for everybody) to bring up the window, I get the system’s default beep. Again, very irritating. Also the animations within the interface seemed a little slow, but your mileage may vary.

All gripes aside, the options that lie within the interface make the program very flexible. You can choose whether or not Screencast has a dock icon, a menu bar icon or neither; You can have the camera follow the mouse or be at a fixed location; select the camera’s size; choose to record audio or not, and from what source.

All very handy, but if you are an iShowU user (I cannot vouch for SnapZ pro as I have never used it) this is all pretty standard. A great unique feature is Screencast’s ability to display shortcut keys and mouse clicks, saving time in post production. Again, nice but not a huge incentive to switch to using this if you are happy with something else, especially as Screencast is $9 more than iShowU.

So after all of this would I recommend you switch? Yes I would. Why? Performance and quality.

The movies that I created using Screencast outshone iShowU by a long, long margin, and for one primary reason: smooth resizing. All this time I have been using iShowU and, although I had set it to a high frame-rate, I never got that smooth, clear picture that I was looking for. If you watch ScreenCastsOnline, or a screencast that you have created using iShowU, and look closely you will notice that the mouse is never quite as it appears on your screen, or that resize doesn’t look as slick, but instead more jerky.

Screencast eliminates these issues completely. Every movie I have taken with it looked exactly as it had on my screen before hand. So for this reason I am going to have to recommend you take a look at Screencast, if you can live with its clunky aspects, the end product will blow you away.

Screencast is $29 shareware and available on the Araelium website.

BitClamp was designed with one task in mind; to keep your data secure. These days we send a lot of files about the internet whether it be via email or posting them up on a server. A lot of the time you have no real idea what route your data is taking to reach its destination, so if you have sensitive data to send this can be a real concern. Enter BitClamp.

BitClamp was designed to be almost invisible in your workflow. It is super lightweight (10 megs as a Universal Binary, around 6 when “slimmed) and super fast. We have optimized BitClamp's encryption to the extent that any normal sized document (a large word document for example) will encrypt instantly, and not just on an octo Mac Pro either. In testing we managed to get instant encryption times for average documents on a G3 iBook. Obviously this is not the case for larger files but it is still incredibly fast.

We also offer optional GZip compression so users can trade compression time for disk space. This gives BitClamp a lot of added flexibility – as does its choice of algorithms. Unlike other encryption software BitClamp does not just offer the user one encryption algorithm, but a choice of three. You can choose between 128 Bit AES, 128 Bit Serpent and 64 Bit Blowfish implementations. So here you can trade speed for security.

Although BitClamp is designed to be “stripped down and tuned up we offer another handy security feature for an added layer of protection. We call them “covert files. I will say now that although they already offer current functionality, it is an idea we are looking to extend in the future. Encrypted files created using BitClamp do not have their own extension, but instead they inherit and mimic those of others. So you can call that encrypted, killer business plan “familypic.jpg. To everyone it will appear to be a jpeg, however, when dropped on BitClamp, it will realise you want to decrypt it and prompt you for your password. At the moment if anything else tries to open the file it will appear “corrupt, but in a future version these will appear as normal images.

As with most shareware, when you buy a license you are not just buying the current version, but also the right to updates of the software (all included up to 2.0). We have a detailed roadmap for BitClamp and this release is just a snap-shot of development. Some of the future features we will be adding include Applescript and Automator functionality, as well as the extensions to the covert files that were mentioned.

Also in Q1 2008 we will release a windows port of the program. It will very much be the same program, a Mac app running on Windows. The idea is to allow our users greater flexibility in who they can send encrypted files to.

Along with the launch of BitClamp we will also be releasing a free program that can decrypt files (with the correct password of course) but not encrypt. This will be Mac only initially until the Windows release. The idea here is so you are not limited to sending an encrypted file to someone (or somewhere) that has a full licensed copy of BitClamp -instead you can decrypt your files on any mac, with a free download.

So that is an idea of the theory behind BitClamp, for more information or to download, visit our website.

They’re great, but I never use their dock icon; I use their keyboard shortcut instead. So, why have them sitting there taking up space in your dock? There is a relatively simple hack that fixes it, so that when launched, the application still runs but does not appear in the dock (or when command – tabbing).

All it requires is a simple addition to the application’s “info.plist”. For those who don’t know, a .plist file (short for preferences list) is a small xml file that you can find all over OS X. Each application contains at least one called “info.plist” that, among other things, tells the OS how to deal with the application. To find this file right (or control) click the application and select “Show package contents.”

This may come as a surprise to some of you but an OS X .app is actually a folder that contains most of the files that the app needs to run. We’ll leave the intricacies for another article. Anyway, Finder will open a new window and there will be a single folder displayed: “Contents”. Open this and you will be presented with a few files and folders. One of these will be called “Info.plist”. That is the one we’re after.

After backing this up, right (control) click on this and open with text edit. What you will see is a small xml file, don’t panic if you haven’t played with xml before we’re not going to do anything drastic. The file will have a central column of data enclosed after a “<dict>” tag and before a “</dict>” tag (this is quite obvious to see). Now at the end of the column add 2 lines (remember before the “</dict>” tag):

"<key>LSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>"
(without the quotes).

They don’t have to line up with the others, but it will certainly make reading much simpler. Now, save this as it was (remember to back up the original as a different file name in case you make a mistake). Next time you launch the application it will not appear in the dock.

N.B. – to quit the application you may have to manually quit its process in the activity monitor, but this depends on the application.

I have to say there were some very good suggestions (in the case of any duplicates, credit was given to the first commenter); it was tough to pick but here we go.

Bisley – Whois information. This could be especially handy when looking to purchase a domain and would be a neat addition to Domainer.

Chris Thomson – Feedburner, Mint and Google analytics integration. The idea that everybody wanted in on! This for me would justify the $40 price tag, let alone all the other features, fantastic idea!

Bruno Casarini – CoverFlow. This interface already takes visual queues from iTunes, CoverFlow would extend this and make the interface more intuitive. (Plus how cool would it be to browse screenshots of your sites in CoverFlow!).

Alex – Partnership with a registrar for built-in purchasing and renewal of domains. This would truly make Domainer a one stop shop for domain buyers, great idea (although hard to pull off).

E.T.Cook – Interfacing with Plesk. Being able to integrate with Plesk (or any other domain manager web-app) could seriously increase Domainer’s functionality – a killer feature.

Thanks to every one who submitted an entry, Rage will be in touch with the winners shortly. If you want to keep up with our giveaways, subscribe to our full page feeds.

Once it catches these sneaky little programs, you can then apply rules to these connections to decide which applications can connect to what. So, I’m sure some of you are saying at this point: “It’s called a firewall mate, and Mac OS X comes with one built in. Well actually, it isn't a firewall in the truest sense. Firewalls block incoming traffic by blocking specific ports.

Little snitch is great as you can apply your rules on an application basis. It is also designed to protect your data from being sent out as opposed to unauthorized connections coming in. By and large, Little Snitch 1 does the job really well; it sits in the background and alerts you when it needs to. From here you can decide whether to allow or deny the connection and for what time period: just this once, until the app quits or forever. You’ll also be pleased to know that the latest beta fully supports Leopard.

Little Snitch is managed through a simple Preference Pane interface, allowing you to switch the filtering on and off, as-well as view, edit and add rules. In short it does one thing and does it well. So what will Little Snitch 2 bring to the table? Well it turns out a whole lot! This simple preference pane has been transformed into a feature packed stand-alone application.

Not only does Little Snitch 2 allow you to do everything you could with version 1, but there is also a full network monitor with a beautiful HUD telling you which applications are connected to where, when you roll over the menu bar icon for a set period of time. The menu bar icon, incidentally, is 2 neat little bar charts. One tells you how much traffic is coming in and the other, what is going out. Think iStat Menus. It’s very handy, but also optional. So if you already have a network monitor running you can decide to switch it off completely.

This, in my opinion, is a great design point, as not everyone will want the space taken up on their menu bar, or the clock cycles taken from their CPU. This kind of flexibility is reflected throughout the application. The real power, however, is in the added functionality to the configuration of Little Snitch. As I mentioned the application is no longer configured via a preference pane but instead by a stand alone application sitting in your Applications folder.

This has given the designers a lot more control over the interface, something they have used to their full advantage. Now you can retrieve info for any app and when editing your rules, you have control over pretty much anything you can think of; from what servers an application is allowed to access, to its broadcast address. All this from one brilliantly designed sheet window.

A lot of Little Snitch's new power comes from the simplicity and brilliance of this kind of interface design. For examples, rules are now visually tied to applications with blue highlights when selected, and green dots denote whether the application has a function allowed, and red if its blocked. Although this all sounds basic, it makes configuring Little Snitch a breeze, especially when compared to the cramped preference pane Little Snitch 1 currently resides in.

Little Snitch 2 is currently in beta with no ETA as of yet. There will be discounted upgrade licenses and best of all if you recently purchased Little Snitch 1 and your serial number starts with “32 then you will receive Little Snitch 2 as a free upgrade. I really suggest you check it out; although it isn't for everybody, this will be a stunning upgrade to an extremely functional application.

Little Snitch 2 is in public beta and is available for free from Objective Development.

As you can see, the UI is intuitive and extremely easy to use. Although I’m not sure about some of the colors used, there are some neat translucent HUD windows which fade in and out to provide basic information about each site in the database. There is also a handy iTunes style sidebar (no doubt we will see a lot more of these when Leopard comes around), which gives you the option to add “groups” and “smart groups.” If you have a lot of domains to deal with, this will no dout be a handy feature.

Finally, there is a standard toolbar at the top allowing the easy addition and editing of domain information as well as a search feature. The app shows various statistics including Google pagerank, Alexa ranking, incoming links, and social tags. This makes it is useful if you want to quickly check the performance of multiple domains. Domainer, however, has one more neat trick up its sleeve. It can sync the dates that your domain names are due to expire with iCal. Although this doesn’t sound that spectacular, I can see it being particularly useful if you manage a lot of domains.

Domainer is a handy little app if you manage a lot of domains, however, the $40 retail price seems a little steep. I think that Rage Software has priced themselves out of a lot of the Mac shareware market. Luckily for you guys, you may not need to fork out the $40. Rage Software has kindly offered to give away five licenses of Domainer to MacApper readers. All you have you have to do is post a comment answering this question:

What new features would you like to see in Domainer?

Answer the question by October 25 at 10AM, and you will be entered to win one of the five free licenses. Good luck!

I use HandBrake as my primary (only) DVD ripper and I am extremely pleased with it. I haven’t come across any of the bugs or stability issues listed with v0.9, but it is still great to see them fixed!

Here is what else is new in the release (from the site):

• Impressive performance enhancements
• Significant interface prettification
• Color subtitles now show up in color
• Changing dimensions in Picture Settings no longer causes a crash
• Forced subtitle support
• Closing the main window no longer causes HandBrake to crash
• Using “Slow” deinterlacing no longer doubles the chapter count.
• MPEG Stream support is now case-insensitive (.VOB as well as .vob, etc) and more compatible
• No more error messages sent to standard out instead of standard error
• Bigger buffer for the activity log
• Proper display of fading subtitles
• “Same as source FPS” now works correctly when the end-credits of a progressive film are interlaced.
• Target size fixed for the umpteenth time

…and assorted other changes.

HandBrake is free and open source and available on the HandBrake development site.

Now some of you may remember TheMacPak – it was a website that sold a nice bundle of Mac apps at a reduced rate. Well it seems it has, or rather will be, reinventing itself as a piece of software much like iTunes, but exclusively tailored for distributing Mac software.

According to Mark this app will be available sometime around Q1 2008. Aww that’s no fun right? We don’t want to wait! Well I have good news. Today around 9AM PST a web based version of TheMacPak’s one-stop application shop will be revealed, and at the end of this article I will dish you a coupon code to save you some skrill.

Now back to the application pictured above. Looks to me like a fairly neat solution, and I think this could be a fantastic addition to the platform and could even help a lot of developers. Curious, I headed over to the website which was empty except for a chat link. I was lucky enough to speak to Mark with TheMacPak and I hurled a couple of questions his way and here is what he had to say:

Me: Ok I’m confused. Am I right that you will have a new Mac pak released today?

Mark: Not a pack, a whole new retail venture. The image I gave you actually gives people a first look at something we’re doing in the near future, which will be the OS X native program for distributing software applications.

Me: Yeah this program sounds really ambitious. Can you give me any numbers on how many titles we can expect?

Mark: We hope to have over 1000 Mac software products on sale by years end 2008.

Me: Jeez that’s a lot. getting back to the web based app released today. How many apps can we expect to see there?

Mark: Hopefully there should be around 250 apps within the next 2 weeks.

Me: Any word on savings for the community?

Mark: Well that is tough to say because of different deals with developers but it should fall between 5-50%.

Me: So will there be bundles or will people just be able to buy whatever apps they like individually?

Mark: Eventually we will have bundles but with TheMacPak people have always complained they wanted to just buy certain software individually that was not part of any bundle. The new project will resolve this by allowing purchases of your favorite applications individually.

Me: Sounds good. Can you give me any of the developer’s who’s products we can expect to see up for sale?

Mark: Pangea, BeLight Software, and Koingo Software are some of our biggest launch partners. We have all their apps, not some of them

Me: Okay so this is 100% digital distribution. That’s great but what about those folks who insist on a physical CD?

Mark: All orders will be available as custom shipped CDs for people who like backups, or who have bad internet connections. We’ll ship those CDs anywhere in the world for $10. For the first time, you’ll be able to get all your favorite Mac software on CD.

Me: Sounds good. Anything else you feel like adding?

Mark: Uhh well we’re giving away an iPod Touch. You will see that soon on our website.

me: Nice! So how about that coupon code?

Mark: Your readers can use the coupon MACAPPER at checkout for 3% off. Oh, and coupon code’s are stackable, so you can use more than one. The code will only work until October 21st.

Thanks Mark! You can bet the entire Mac community will be interested in the web based shop appearing today. Mark told me his companies vision it to have every Mac application available on one website (and eventually via an OS X based front end). Very ambitious. Will be interesting to see how this project develops and I will keep you all updated with news and developments when I hear more. In the mean time keep your eyes peeled over at TheMacPak for the release of something exciting around 9AM PST today!

Now my “personal finance issues (otherwise known as being a student) are fairly simple. I have very little money, especially for someone who lusts over hi-tech gadgets and the latest must have items.

MoneyWell claims it will help me solve this issue by using a savings method (which may be familiar to some users) called the “envelope scheme. The principle being that you create envelopes for each area that you want to save in. Effectively you are creating micro-budgets. So in MoneyWell, you’re not just buying the software, but also a method of using your money. I wanted to really test and see how I got on with this.

At first, I admit, it wasn’t too easy. I had to keep reminding myself to open up Money Well and update all my values etc. But soon I got into a rhythm and now I don't think I could be without it. In short: the saving method works brilliantly. But since I could achieve that with a spreadsheet, what about the software (you know the bit that I'm meant to be reviewing)?

When I first opened MoneyWell, I was a bit intimidated. After creating a new file (or database) it presents you with a huge number of default “buckets (same as envelopes) to choose from. Of course you tend to scroll down the list and think you will need them all and so you are then faced with a huge amount of buckets to set up. This can quickly turn you off the idea.

However, when you discover that the key is in fact to setup just a few buckets, the software really is flawless. It strikes the perfect balance between features and ease of use. It’s the type of program that you can just open up and quickly update and be done with in 5 seconds, but also spend a good half an hour in and customize every little detail of your spending.

The interface is nice, but it isn't very standard, so if your obsessed with everything being perfectly aqua, then your going to be slightly disappointed. However, don't let that description put you off. Trust me, it looks good, and is brilliantly functional. MoneyWell is a really slick app, not only for the software but for the underlying principle itself. Its really worth a try especially if you have tried other finance apps before and never really got on with them.

MoneyWell is $39.99 shareware and available on the No Thirst website.

I will start off by saying this application blew me away. I am currently running a 1st gen MacBook and I could not believe how snappy this app was. It puts spotlight (and Quicksilver, in my opinion) to shame.

That said, let me explain a little more about what LaunchBar is. Here’s what their website says:

LaunchBar is an award winning productivity utility that provides instant access to your applications, documents, contacts and bookmarks, to your iTunes library, to search engines and more, just by entering short abbreviations of the searched item’s name.

The launch bar looks like this:

This bar drops down from your menu-bar when you hit the keyboard shortcut of your choice. (Mine is set to command-space). You then type the first few letters of what you want to launch/open and it presents you with a list (instantly – and usually the first one is what your after) of applications/iTunes song/folder/etc. I could spend ages going over each little bit of functionality but I will just pick out a few highlights; if you’re interested in the complete list, head over to their website.

As far as features go – it’s the simplest that are some of the best. This thing is unbelievably fast. I mean instant, even on my CoreDuo MacBook. Adding to this speed, it seems that 99% of the time, what you’re after appears within the first few letters of your typing. In short, Launchbar has made me blisteringly fast around my Mac.

It also has some really neat features other than just launching apps. You can navigate your files and hit tab to bring up an open-with segment, then type to choose the app to open the file with, and you’re ready to go.

Command-G also pulls in the current selection in finder into Launchbar, which you can then manipulate. For example, say I have an image selected on the desktop. I hit Command-Space (to bring up LaunchBar) Command-G (to bring in the finder selection), then Tab to select an app to open with. Of course this is a huge advantage if there is a long list, as all I have to do is start typing and the result list is automatically narrowed.

Here’s another time saver. Bring up LaunchBar and hit full stop; it changes to an “Open Location bar – you then type the name of a site (.com is automatically added unless you add a different extension), hit return and it opens the site in your default browser – very neat. This, for me, has changed how I use my Mac – and I love it. It has gotten to the stage where I feel really slow without LaunchBar; it makes that much of a difference. I really suggest you at least give it a try and see how you get on with it. I was hesitant at first, but i now cannot live without it.

LaunchBar is shareware ($20) and you can find it on their website.

It was a tough call to pick out just 5 of you, but here are the winners, in no particular order.

• Catatonic – An on-the-fly preview in a browser of your choice. Considering the variety of browsers out these days I thought this would be a valuable addition to the app.
• Trotsky – Tabs. Trotsky made several suggestions but the one that really hit a chord for me was tabs – a great interface idea.
• ErichD – Rapidweaver Plugin. (and a few more). A lot of people in the Mac community really love Rapidweaver and it would be great to see Button Design integrated with it in some way. Also mentioned was some integration with RAGE Map design – this would be sweet. (we will be taking a look at RAGE Map Design shortly).
• DMD – Export to form element. Not much to add to this, it would be super handy and would make integration with your web-sites even easier.
• Pemmax – Flash Effects. Although the buttons look great as they are, some nice flash effects could really add to the app.

Congratulations to all winners, RAGE should be in touch very shortly.

Also, thanks to everyone who participated, there were some great suggestions , I think everyone mentioned template editing so I decided to pretty much exclude it, and some were narrowly beaten. Well done all, and look out for some more giveaways coming soon!

It was the case recently when I was trying to design a good looking button, for a new website. Thank goodness, RAGE software’s Button Design was there to rescue me. Sort of.

The principle of Button Design is fairly simple: It allows you to create and export web buttons from included templates. When you open it up, you are presented with an intuitive interface:

From here you can choose a template, adjust the text, font and the position of the text. It does all of this beautifully but unfortunately it is fairly limited by the templates available. For me there are only a few that are really viable for use on a modern website and there is no way to create a template. It seems to me they missed a trick here, as you could have a method where designers could create templates for you to download.

The app itself it simple, and it does its job brilliantly well: creating buttons is very quick and easy and you have loads of control over your buttons. So its hard to fault in that respect. But at the end of the day, the app is only as good as the buttons it creates and this is controlled by the quality of the templates.

So if you see a template you like, then odds are you are going to produce a button that really does your site justice – otherwise your out of luck unless RAGE decides to open up a template creation feature.

RAGE ButtonDesign is shareware with a free trial and is available on their website for $19.95.

Lucky for you guys who find a button they like, we have been given 5 licenses to give away to MacApper readers. To enter all you have to do is comment below and answer the following question:

What is the feature that you would most like to see from Button Design?