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Want to get into the Halloween Holiday spirit early? Don’t get out the orange spray paint and deviled eggs just yet! Add a little Halloween flair to your desktop with Mac-O-Lantern!

Mac-O-Lantern is a small application that adds an animated Jack-O-Lantern to your desktop. This digital pumpkin comes with an animated candle and a ton of customization options.

When you first open up Mac-O-Lantern, the default design is a simple face with triangle shaped eyes and nose. You can drag the pumpkin anywhere on your screen. The options allow you to blow out the candle, change how fast the candle flickers, display how many days till Halloween in the dock, change the layer behavior of the pumpkin, and change the pumpkin’s opacity and size.

Face it. As students, we’re bound to be working in the middle of the night on that almost-forgotten homework assignment. If you’re doing stuff that could (somehow) change the future, you don’t want to use a standard, dull calculator.

Moreover, I’m guessing you’ve had enough math today and just want to get this over and done with. What could you do? Let me introduce Soulver, the calculator based on the English language.

Every once in a while, there comes an app that can be extremely fun and very useful at the same time. One of these apps is called OmniDazzle from the OmniGroup. OmniDazzle is basically a bunch of plugins that highlights certain areas of your screen and to create some snazzy visual effects. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this tasteful review of OmniDazzle.

Most of us know Coda as the radically productive web development tool from Panic, which recently won the User Experience Award at WWDC. Coda has some features none of the competition has including live editing, a built-in CSS editor, and a library of reference materials for programmers. MacApper already did a full coda review way back in late April when it was released, but I thought it would be cool to do a video review of this tool, to better illustrate some of its core features.

For a while now I’ve been searching for a great RSS reader. In the time since Safari RSS was introduced, I’ve jumped on the RSS bandwagon and have collected feeds using Safari’s talents and clippings feature. Though with Safari RSS, the more feeds I collected, the harder and more of a pain it was to read them all. Then I stumbled on NewsFire.

NewsFire is built on the solid principle of being invisible, yet letting the core features and abilities shine through. All you have to focus on is the content and let NewsFire do the rest.

In the Beginning

iPhoto is an amazing photo manager and editor; however, Apple has added quite a few features in iPhoto that allow you create books and calendars with your digital photographs. In this tutorial, you will learn how easy it is to make your very own professional calendars!

To begin, select one of your favorite albums. Go down to the bottom of the window and click the + Calendar button. iPhoto will ask you to choose a theme of your liking. Use the scroll bar to go through the available themes. A preview of that theme is shown to the right.

Looking for a better PDF reader than Preview? Skim is a PDF reader with a few powerful built-in editing tools such as adding an arrow/circle, or striking out unwanted text. With Skim, you can quickly sort through and edit your PDFs in a pinch.

In order to access Skim’s main interface, you have to open a PDF file using the File > Open command or Apple + O. Once you’ve loaded your PDF, you’ll probably notice the interface is a lot like Mac OS X’s Preview. There’s a text selecting tool, a cropping/selecting tool, and a note tool. One new tool is the zoom tool. To use it, click on a section of the PDF to show a small box which magnifies the text and images. This makes it easy to look at sections of your PDF when already zoomed out.

Recent switchers know that on a PC, if you press the alt key, it automatically highlights the first menu allowing you to access sub-menu items quickly and easily. Mac OS X does the same thing. Simply press control + F2 (laptops press function + control + F2) to highlight the Apple menu. Once there, you can tab across or use the arrow keys to choose which menu you want to open. Once you find the right one, press return or the down arrow key to navigate through the menu.

Have you ever sent an email to someone and then needed to find their email address? Sure you could look in your sent items, but what if you have Mail set to delete sent emails after a period of time, or don’t save your sent messages at all? Here’s a clever trick that I just learned about: the Previous Recipients window. To go to this window, click on the Window menu, then Previous Recipients.

Did you ever notice the different types of buttons on a dialog box? One button is pulsing with an aqua-like blue. Another is just a plain button, and the last one has a light blue border around it. What if I told you that you could click on any of these buttons without touching the mouse?

For those of you who have an older Mac that doesn’t have Front Row, there is still hope for you. What if I told you there was a way to control your Mac with a Wii remote? All it requires is a Bluetooth supported Mac, a Nintendo Wii Remote (use this if you don’t have a Wii), and a small free application called DarwiinRemote (Direct Link).

You can also configure the remote to control pretty much anything. Interested?

You have the money, and the need for a new laptop. You know you want a Mac that you’ve narrowed your choice to two models. One of them is the high-end MacBook ($1,499 USD), the other is the low-end MacBook Pro ($1,999 USD). Which one should you choose? This post is all about which of the two models is best for you and why.

The Processor
One of the main things that people look at is the processor. It’s the core of your new computer. Both the MacBook and the Pro are Intel based. The MacBook runs on a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo and the Pro utilizes a 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo. This means that the MacBook Pro is slightly faster then the high end MacBook.

Feeder from Reinvented Software, is an RSS feed composer and publisher. With its easy-to-use interface and powerful tool set, Feeder is the best of its kind. Previously, I reviewed Feeder and held a contest allowing one lucky commenter to walk home with a Feeder license. It is now my pleasure to announce the winner.

The winner of the Feeder contest is FBinDC!

Your license should be in the mail very soon.

What are portable apps?

Portable applications are apps that can run on any external hard drive. This makes it easy to use multiple computers without syncing. This also means that you can keep your Address book contacts, email messages, and Safari/FireFox bookmarks while you go to any Library, Café, or office computer.

Finding a Drive

Portable applications are designed to be used on small drives such as USB flash drives or “thumb drives”. The size of the drive depends on what you are going to do with it. If you plan on running your email client, try to use a larger drive. Remember: Every single email gets saved to your external drive. You may run out of space sooner then you think.

Feeder is an RSS composer. Just like writing messages in Mail, Feeder uploads messages to your RSS feed. Feeder is really one of a kind. You make a new feed, write a few articles, and publish. Feeder can even make podcasts and appcasts as well.

Making a feed is easy. First, enter the name, URL, and description of your feed. Once you do that, choose from 6 different templates or a default one. Please note that all templates have a body field for your content.

News: Use this one for standard news feeds. Includes title, article link, date, time, and author fields.