Author Archive

A month ago I reviewed Stomp by Shinywhitebox, the video application to reencode, crop and add effects to your videos. The developers agreed to give away one license for Stomp. Your suggestions have been very constructive and they’ll sureley help the developers improve their application.

The randomly picked winner of the giveaway is: Stephan

The developers has been informed of your email so you should receive your license soon.
Thanks again to everyone who participated.

Last November Shinywhitebox released Stomp. Stomp is a very useful application that allows you to re-encode videos, crop them, add effects and even more. Shinywhitebox is a software company from New Zealand that has already created two apps: iShowU, a screen recording tool, and Chatter, a screensharing tool. Today they released the 1.6 version of Stomp; let’s see in more detail what this application is capable of.

Stomp has two main features : re-encoding and effects.

The first feature allows you to re-encode a video in a different format. The application includes a lot of different presets from Apple TV to YouTube, but you can also choose your own settings for both video and audio, and even create your own presets.

A new version of DrawIt, an easy-to-use, powerful image editing and drawing application, was recently released. This new version brings some new features to the table but the main change is the interface which has now been completely overhauled. At its heart DrawIt is an image editing and drawing application that features vector and bitmap editing tools and a non-destructive editing mode.

As mentioned, the interface has been totally redesigned with some help by Laurent Baumann and sometimes reminds me of the look of Finder. Take a look below.

The 3.1 version of NetNewsWire, the well-known RSS reader, has just been released. Along with new features, such as a new view mode, HTML archiving, and performance enhancements, the major change in this new version is that the application is now totally free.

Newsgator, the company that bought the application decided to drop the paid model for a totally free model. This application which used to cost $30, is now totally free. The Lite version of NNW has suitably disappeared but note that people who purchased NetNewsWire in the past 30 days are entitled to a refund.

Yesterday, Waterfall Software released version 2.7 of Wallet, their well known private data manager. Wallet allows you to manage all your passwords, applications’ serial numbers, and other important data. All of your information is well protected with a 448-bit Blowfish encryption. This new version adds better Leopard integration and some cool new features such has Global Search.

The new user interface now matches Leopard’s look. It also fixes the graphical bugs that were present with the last version when running on Leopard.

Bee Documents recently released Timeline 2. This new version of the popular timeline application brings a lot of new features to the table, and the completly redesigned user interface actually makes the app much easier to use.

A bulk edit mode allows you to create a timeline by entering events in a table. Support of images has also been added; you just have to drag and drop an image on a selected event and it’s added to your timeline. You can also now create multiple event rows which is great if you want to compare two parallel actions. Here is an image of the reworked interface to demonstrate.

For Christmas, DivX is offering the Pro version of their software for a limited time. The pro version brings the DivX Codec and the DivX Converter application to the free version of DivX. DivX Pro Codec allows you to export your videos with DivX encoding within Quicktime, and other video applications such as iMovie or Final Cut Pro. If you don’t know DivX converter is an application that lets you convert any video file into the DivX format. It also supports batch encoding to DivX.

Recently, designer and developer Tom Stoelwinder released Anxiety. Anxiety is a very simple but highly effective To-do list application that allows you to easily create lists and to-dos inside those lists. Its main characteristics are its strong integration with OS X and a very clean interface, but there are other features that make it a truly perfect To-do list manager.

Pixelmator is a fairly new image-editing application, recently reviewed here. The focus of the application is to provide easy but powerful image editing . Recently, Pixelmator’s team released the first 0.x update of the application: version 1.1, codename Kitten. This new version brings a lot of new features such as graphic tablet support, a QuickLook plugin and many new filters.

Two weeks back, Reinvented Software released the second version of Together, an application to manage your documents.

Together 2.0, previously known as K.I.T. (Keep It Together), brings a lot of new features such as a widescreen mode, an improved search, Leopard support and the Shelf: a side-panel available in every application.

At its heart Togeher is a files manager, much like Yojimbo. It allows you to manage all kind of files (images, videos, texts, or even links), so that you know where they are. It also allows you to create folders to keep your files organized and, for example, regroup files that are used for the same goal. You can edit text right in Together so you don’t have to open an external editor.

Long-awaited CandyBar 3 has just been released by Panic. Not only does this version bring Leopard support, but it also adds a lot of new features to the application.

For example, you can now customize the Dock. Another big move is that since Pixadex (a software to manage your icons) and Candybar are merged, you can more functionality in a single application.

CandyBar is an application that lets you customize your system icons like the folders, the trash, the drives… Pixadex was an application to organize and browse your icon library. By fusing both applications together, you can not only customize your icons, but also manage them in the same application, which is very handy. In the process of merging those two great apps, Panic Inc decided to change its user interface.

Version 1.7 of Yummy FTP, which is - obviously - an FTP client, has just been released by Yummy Software. This application is well-known for its file uploading speed compared to other existing applications.

This new version brings to the application Leopard support and built-in Quick Look functionality, among other enhancements.

Yummy FTP claims to be the fastest FTP client for Mac on the market. In fact, the developer indicates that Yummy FTP is not only faster than other FTP applications like Fetch, Transmit or Interarchy, but it also uses far less CPU cycles. Indeed, they’re 4 times faster than Fetch for transferring 385 files, because it uses only 10% of the CPU, whereas Fetch uses 60% and Transmit clocks in at 100%.

Yesterday MidnightApps released the 1.1.2 version of Cha-Ching which brings long awaited Leopard support and a lot of bug fixes to its popular persnoal finances app.

So now Cha-Ching runs properly on Leopard and the transition between the 1.1.1 version and the 1.1.2 doesn’t cause any trouble (at least, I didn’t see any problem but backup your database which is in your Application Support folder if you’re paranoid). The main developer, Juan Alvarez (featured in our WWDC video here), describes this version as a “big compatibility update”. Indeed, a lot of bugs affecting 1.1.1 on Leopard have been fixed.

On October 29th MiraSoftware announced that BluePhoneElite was finally out of beta and available for purchase. BluePhoneElite 2 is the new version of BluePhoneElite, an application to manage your cell-phone. We have never reviewed BluePhone here and I am not sure why as it is quite an amazing accessory for busy mobile users.

This new retail version brings a lot of new features to the table such as SMS management when the cell-phone isn’t connected, a new plug-in architecture, better OS X integration, and much more.