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FilmRedux is actually VisualHub. When Techspansion closed, they made VisualHub open-source with a new name, FilmRedux. If you have used VisualHub before, then you will get used to this very easily. And don’t worry, there are many very talented programmers dedicated to this project. To download this, you must use SVN. SVN (or Subversion) is a tool that is used by developers to share their code amongst themselves. Many projects like Adium, Handbrake and Transmission are open-source and use SVN. To download it using SVN, open the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and type, “svn co https://transcoderredux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/transcoderredux FilmRedux”. Once it is done, navigate to ~/FilmRedux/FilmRedux and open FilmRedux.xcodeproj. Then, just click on the Build and Go toolbar icon in Xcode and you’re off!

Recently, I reviewed Bento, the amazingly simple and elegant database tool exclusively for the Mac. Well, they have just released something called the Holiday Pack.

The Bento Holiday Pack is a completely free download, and contains a 30-day trial of Bento (enough time to get those holiday cards sent). The only difference between it and regular Bento 2, is that it contains festive themes and templates that can help you organize your cards, gifts and other holiday-related items. This Holiday Pack also helps keep track of information such as price per recipient of gifts (which in the economic situation today, is very important) and you can even make notations of tax-deductable items. You can even make a tally of all your purchases to make sure you stay in your budget!

Sometimes you just have to measure things on your Mac. If you’re a designer, you have to measure distances between objects. And if you do any kind of creative work, or page layouts, you also need measurements. You could eyeball it, or you could get a tool like xScope. But, if all you need are simple rulers, you will want to look at omnidea’s Rulers.

Over the last few months, I have seen my fair share of new clipboard managers. Some of them are really just clipboard managers, but only one has really wowed me. This one has an amazing interface for handling clippings, but yet it is also extremely usable. It is Clips by Conceited Software.

Apple has always been very generous to us by giving us a great, free PDF viewer. Although, sometimes that is just not enough. Sometimes we need features like annotation, forms and shapes. Sure, there’s Adobe Acrobat but that’s extremely pricy if you just want a few more features than Preview. Well, there’s another choice: SmileOnMyMac’s PDFPen.

Think about a piece of paper with text on it. You can draw on it, annotate it and white out text. This is exactly what PDFPen lets you do to PDFs. It turns a PDF into a piece of paper. However, that’s not all it does. It has many other great features; one of which is OCR.

A couple months ago, I reviewed ExpanDrive, the application that gave a seamless way to treat SFTP/SSH drives like real hard drives. At the time, many people were unhappy that it didn’t have FTP and FTPS support. Well, I can now say that ExpanDrive has support for both of these in version 1.3.

Last Week, I reviewed Bento 1.0, the extremely easy-to-use database tool designed for the Mac. Well, little did I know that only a week later Bento 2.0 would be released.

Bento 2.0 contains many nice new features, and a little layout adjustment. First, I will talk about the layout adjustment. In previous versions of Bento there was a panel on the right side of the window. This panel contained all of the fields for the current database. In 2.0, this has been moved over to the right side below the Library list. This gives you much more room for the database itself and makes Bento less cluttered. However, if you have a lot of libraries or fields, this can get fairly annoying.

If you are in school then you know how important it is to take notes, no matter what the class. The old way to do this on your Mac was to just create a lot of Pages or Office documents, and put them in a folder. That method starts to have major flaws once you reach maybe 15 different documents. Well, Circus Ponies brought virtual notebooks onto your computer once with NoteBook, and they’ve done it even better with NoteBook 3.0.

The first thing you will notice about NoteBook is how much it actually looks like a notebook. It has the fringes and everything! It makes it seem much more like taking notes than when done in Pages.

About a year ago shinywhitebox’s iShowU, the amazing and simple screen capturing app, was reviewed by Michael. Today, I am here to tell you about their newest versions of iShowU, called iShowU HD and HD Pro.

iShowU HD and HD Pro still have the same basis as iShowU: real time screen capturing. This means that there is no need to encode your move after it has been made, because it is being encoded in real time. This is a feature that, in my opinion, moves iShowU ahead of most other screen capturing apps. It also has the usual system audio and microphone recording, pausing, and mouse following.

If you have ever tried to use something like FileMaker Pro for making a simple and small database, you know how clunky and complicated it is. Maybe you’ve wanted to make a database, but didn’t want to spend $300+ on FileMaker Pro. Well, there is another option: FileMaker’s Bento.

Bento is a simpler and more Mac-like version of the FileMaker software. It works in the same way, so it’s not that big of a switch from FileMaker Pro. However, as I said, it’s simpler; it does not have all the features of FileMaker Pro, so if you need some of FileMaker Pro’s more advanced features, or if you are using databases professionally, I suggest you stick with FileMaker Pro.

If you do any coding, you know how tedious it can be to remember how to do certain things. For example, if you’re a web designer and you do a lot of mouseover popups, you want the code to be right there, and you don’t want to have to remember all 20+ lines. Sure, you could use something like TextExpander, but if you want more features made for programmers, I suggest you try out M Cubed Software’s Code Collector Pro.

If you’re a student, you know how important references are. If you’re writing a huge paper, or even a lab report, you will need to not only find sources, but actively use them. Sure, you could (and should also) put them at the bottom of your paper, but that doesn’t help when it’s the day before the paper is due and you left that book at school. Well with Malkinware’s Reference Tracker, you can not only easily store your references, but include the cited text, too.

Most of us use email for important things as well as just for chatting, and even some of those chats can turn out to be important. We need a way to easily backup and archive email so none of it ever goes missing. Well, MailSteward goes above and beyond that with features like a SQLite database, tagging, and searching.

IRC is one of the most used, yet oldest forms of Internet chat. Because of this, it is also very simple. So, if IRC is so simple to use, why are the clients sometimes so difficult to figure out? Well, the word “simple” gets a whole new meaning with Linkinus.

Let’s face it — Maintenance is very important. Some people don’t do it merely because they say it’s too hard. Some don’t have enough time. Well, the times have changed; there are now many maintenance apps out there. However, one of them stands out a lot to me — Maintain’s Cocktail.

The first thing you will notice about Cocktail is its super clean interface. It simply looks good. It is the first maintenance app I have seen that looks like someone took time to design. Even though it isn’t an app that you will have open more than once a week, it is still nice to see a great looking interface.