Consider the following: you’re a competent Mac user, but you take Terminal’s name literally and you wish there were an easier way to tweak your Mac experience to be just the way you need it to be. MacPilot steps in to offer you a surprising number of system customization options, along the same lines as Cocktail, TinkerTool and Onyx except better, according to the installation notes.

In practice, it turns out that the claim may not be far off. MacPilot boasts an intuitive interface that brings what you need to see into a single window instead of forcing you to wade through too many tabs to find your way to the setting you’d like to tweak. At launch, MacPilot opens with its General panel open to you, allowing you to scroll to find the app you need to tweak and access all of the possible modifications for it.

And make no mistake, there are a lot of options. You can find a list of them on their Features page, but some of our favourites are the ability to easily show/hide hidden files, add spacers and stacks to my dock, specify default fonts system-wide, change the desktop picture (and welcome text) for the login screen…the list literally just keeps going and you’ll likely find yourself discovering neat new tweaks that improve your user experience as you explore the app.

MacPilot is a very conscientious tweaker though; it won’t let you change any settings if the app in question is running, offering the explanation that applying changes on the fly might cause instability or not remain permanent. It thoughtfully gives you the option to exit and restart the app while the change is being made to ensure you don’t run into any problems. And if you’re not sure what a certain change does, the little yellow ribbon at the bottom of the window tells you specifically what will happen if you play with the setting.

There’s more to this app than just tweaking system settings though, it also offers a set of useful tools for running routine maintenance operations on your system. From basic disc verification and permissions checks, to User Cache and Icon clearing and verification of preference file integrity, MacPilot has you covered for basic system management needs. To access all of the added goodies, simply find the panel at the top that refers to the area of your system that you want to perform maintenance on, and MacPilot will give you quick access to all the options available.

Strangely though, the “safety” warnings and helpful explanation bars that make the tweaks in the General panel so accessible to standard users are absent from the other panels in MacPilot. This means that one could theoretically disable or even remove some fairly important system items by accident. Thankfully, the most important maintenance tasks require Administrator access to engage.

Many users may also wonder why there’s a $19.95 price tag on an app that has so many free competitors. There’s no easy answer to the question, except to say that MacPilot melds system tweaking capabilities with routine maintenance ones into a single package. So, although you can do all of these things with a series of freeware alternatives, if you’re looking to do it all in one stable, safe, and accessible place, then you can’t go wrong with MacPilot.

MacPilot is available from Koingo Software for $19.95.

Disclaimer: Our sponsor, MacUpdate, is currently offering a Promo Holiday Bundle that includes MacPilot and 9 other great Mac apps for only $49.99. This review was written without any influence from MacUpdate or the developer. If you would like to purchase the bundle, click here.

Since it seems to be a common belief that video games are to Mac users what telephones are to the Amish, it’s refreshing to see a technological design visionary like Will Wright acknowledging that gaming is just as sought-after, if only less accessible, for Mac users as for PC junkies. To that end, he has taken one of many pioneering steps with his newest brain child, Spore, in releasing the game simultaneously for the PC and Mac - as a single hybrid DVD.

Spore is best understood as a combination of five separate mini-games, or “stages”, each of which is at least functional, if not always particularly compelling on its own. These stages are plastered together using slideshow cut scenes, and the end result is a bit of a jarring journey that nevertheless allows you to follow the existence of your Frankensteinian monster babies from glorified plankton to space-faring civilizations.

Because the five stages are quite distinct from each other, I have split this review into sections to address the stages separately before I comment on the game as a whole. Spore is a massive world, and my journey through it to bring you this review has been long and challenging. Even so, I may still have only scratched the surface. Now, I invite you to join me as I share the tale of my experiences…

“Waiter, there’s a bug in my primordial soup!” The Cell Stage

Spore starts with the aptly named “Cell” stage, where you bear witness to a particularly durable meteorite that manages to survive a brush up against a blazing star, only to shatter pathetically when it crashes into the ocean of an unsuspecting planet that, in my case, was called “Snorp”.

Squishy Sheds its Shell

Moments later, deep in the primordial seas of Snorp, a fragment of the space rock splits open to reveal… a tiny squishy thing! Once little Squishy shakes out of its asteroid shell, you gain control and begin navigating through the gelatinous environment. If you’ve chosen to be carnivorous (as I had done), then the object at this point is to hunt for the little pink spongy blobs floating around you (as opposed to the little green spongy blobs that your vegan counterparts will be harvesting).

Cells Just

Wanna Have Fun

Once you’ve collected enough DNA points to fill up the DNA bar at the bottom of your screen, you’ll be asked to call out for a mate in order to consummate your readiness for transition to the next evolutionary stage in the game. After watching Manfred and Manuella engage in a PG-13 love dance, you (Manfred that is, which can be a bit distressing for male players) will lay an egg and proceed to enter another creation tool set.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully completed the first of five evolutionary stages in Spore! By this point in the game you will have grasped almost all of the major gameplay elements that will occur again and again throughout the rest of the stages, only on a different scale.

Disco Diplomacy The Creature Stage

You regain control of Manfred at a nesting site where you and all the other little Manfreds live happily together in a family group. You basically have two choices when it comes to how you deal with another species at this point in the game: you can either kill and eat them (assuming you’re strong enough), or you can engage in a cross-cultural game of Disco Simon Says. More on that later.

Luckily, as the proud creator of a carnivore, your only real choice is deciding which of the available species Manfred is going to commit culinary genocide against.

Combat in Spore resembles the combat in turn-based games in the sense that all it really consists of is you clicking the opposing creature repeatedly to unleash your attacks while your opponent does much the same thing against you. This continues until one of you dies. Your number of attacks and their strength are dictated, as are many other things, by the parts you chose to put on Manfred.

Manfred Sneaks up on a Skeleton

Once the tribe is completely eliminated, you are considered victorious and awarded with a number of DNA points that varies according to how difficult the creatures were to kill compared to your strength. And yes, to be perfectly clear, you have to eliminate all of the offending creatures in order to win your reward there’s no Noah’s Ark business happening on Snorp, it’s all or nothing.

But what happens if you encounter a species of creature and don’t feel like eating them? Well, the two of you can engage in what can only be called a cheap disco parody of Simon Says, where your opponent will make a friendly gesture at you (again dictated by the body parts you’ve chosen) which you are then expected to repeat back to them. Possible exchanges include singing, dancing, and posing. After you’ve exchanged a few rounds of such pleasantries and filled up both ends of a little meter that appears, Spore considers that you’ve impressed your opponent. Now you get to do the same thing with three other members of the species in order to secure the alliance.

Disco Diplomacy

Progression through the rest of this stage essentially entails more of the same, with occasional pauses to add more parts to Manfred and the odd “migration” where your entire family of Manfreds spontaneously leaves without you while you’re out hunting and you come home only to find that you have to trek halfway across the planet to catch up with them.

Sporadic Strategy The Tribal/Civilization Stages

When you reach the Tribal Stage, you’re ready to outfit Manfred with clothing, armour, and other such accoutrements of tribal culture. This includes jewelry, by the way, in case you male players weren’t already gender-confused enough after so much egg laying.

Manfred's Mariachi Barbeque

The Tribal Stage and onward is where we start getting into a little more complexity in terms of the gameplay. If you’ve ever played a Real-Time Strategy game like the Civilization series or Age of Empires, then you’ll recognize the basic mechanics of what you’re seeing in Spore from here on in. The issue is that they’ve taken that formula and stupefied it down to the point where it’s annoyingly superficial for players who, like me, are used to the in-depth and glorious scope of RTS games like Supreme Commander or even StarCraft.

Tribes Clash in Battle

Obviously, Spore is not trying to make a full RTS out of its individual later-game stages, and comparisons to the titles I mentioned above are not only unfair but also misguided. Nevertheless, the execution feels somewhat stunted and unsatisfying for those who are used to this style of gameplay on the scale provided by those classics.

In all honesty, it becomes quite difficult to judge Spore accurately beyond the Tribal Stage because it’s hard to be sure when it’s taking itself seriously and when it’s just throwing up copious amounts of cute aesthetics and brilliantly-executed procedural environments to distract us from the fact that the underlying gameplay is surprisingly hollow.

Once you hit the Civilization Stage, you’re put in control of things from a scaled-back, more god-like perspective that removes the more close-up interactions with your creature. This is actually an important problem because, in doing so, Spore ends up denying you one of the principle appeals of the game and, not least of all, one of the main distractions from the shallow gameplay.

The Birth of a Civilization

For me, as soon as everything was scaled back and I was left with nothing but the ambiguous civilization of Manfreds to look down upon, I started to miss those nights by the campfire with Chief Manfred, and I felt a lot of Spore’s charm drift off into space, where I hoped to regain it…

The Final Frontier The Space Stage

Stars, Asteroids, Black Holes, Oh My!

The Space Stage has an advantage over the Tribal and Civilization Stages in that it actually feels like a culmination of all the gameplay elements that have led you to this point. There really is a lot to do here the terraforming, exploring, and large-scale expansion elements are both engaging and entertaining, while still maintaining the cutesy Spore aesthetic and, more than any of the other stages, Space will keep your mind suitably occupied with interstellar tasks.

Which brings me to the negative aspects. For some reason, a number of Spore players (including this one) encountered a bizarre quirk of the game’s AI engine that spontaneously decides to hike up the difficulty when you reach the Space Stage. Even on the highest difficulty setting, it’s really not a challenge to get through the earlier stages of Spore it’s a happy and carefree experience.

But then suddenly, when you reach the Space Stage, you’re plopped into a universe where aggressive enemies will systematically kick your ass(es) and consistently outperform you with superior firepower, accuracy, range, and, most annoyingly, numbers. There is an endless supply of things that want to kill you in Spore’s space, and when you and your allies are being deliberately creamed by a force triple your size and then pirates show up on top of that, it sort of makes you wish that Manfred had never crawled out of Snorp’s oceans to begin with.

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One of Many Planets

Spore and the Evolution of Mac Gaming The Verdict

Reaching my quota of allowable installs, thanks to EA’s idiotically draconian DRM scheme for the game, I managed to install and play Spore on a Mac Pro, a Macbook Pro, and a PC desktop to judge the performance differences between the platforms. The Mac Pro and PC both ran spore at the absolute highest settings without breaking a sweat, and even my two-year-old, 15″ Macbook Pro ran it smoothly at the high quality settings. I did not experience a single crash on any of the three systems over the hours of testing, which is impressive in itself and serves as a testament to the engine’s brilliant engineering. We should thank Maxis for putting in the time to make the Mac version every bit as polished as the PC one in terms of execution.

On the topic of EA’s marketing disaster of a DRM system, I could spend a whole new article discussing just that. But I don’t have to because it’s been discussed before. Suffice it to say that the entire concept of such rigid restraints is self-defeating because it alienates legitimate customers. Pirates aren’t going to stop pirating because of a DRM system on the legal copies of the game. Thilo, the author of the article at the second to last link, summarizes:

“News flash: Pirates don’t convert. They are stubborn and ruthless. Hence the term “pirate. ” [sic] They steal games. If they can’t steal a game, they steal it from a friend. If they can’t steal it from a friend, they steal a different game. Half the fun of playing a game is stealing it.”

As of this article’s writing, it appears that EA has finally relented to the righteous pressure of their former fans and planned to remove the digital incarceration system they attached to Maxis’ poor game. Also at the time of this writing, the Spore v1.01 patch has been released, but only for the PC. Us Mac folks are still waiting, but Maxis assures us that we’ll get our patch soon.

Setting aside all the minor quibbles, Spore is a game to be appreciated and admired as an adventurous step forward in procedural game design and large-scale mechanics. It is ultimately an ambitious and successful science project, and should be understood as such. Having said that, actually playing through Spore can be tedious and unfulfilling at times specifically because it feels more like a science experiment than a coherent gaming experience.

To wrap up, even with its truly brilliant art direction, impressive sound design, and compelling concept, the fundamental fact of the matter remains that Spore is marketed as a video game, not an experiment in gaming technology, and the experience of playing through the fragmented sections can be unsatisfying, disjointed, and tedious words which should not have to be used to describe something that’s meant to be fun.

Fresh audiences may find themselves drawn into an interesting and pleasing world that offers a simplistic gaming entertainment; however, audiences going in with the high expectations nurtured through years of waiting and watching and re-watching every tantalizing video and announcement will likely be left mildly disappointed.

So, after all that, what’s the verdict? I give Spore three and a half evolutionary stages out of five.

Pick up a copy from your nearest gaming retailer or buy and download it online, then play through it yourself and let us know what you think of Spore!

For a number of weeks now, Adobe has been tantalizing their loving horde of followers with the promise of a “Brilliant Event” taking place on the 23rd of September that’s today. It wasn’t really too much of a mystery though, as it was clear from the start that the big event is the unveiling of the long-awaited next installment in their multi-purpose creative design software package: Creative Suite 4. Interestingly, Adobe has chosen to call this their biggest software release to date, and when someone like Adobe says that, people take note.

Officially unveiled in a large-scale public webcast at 9AM Eastern Time this morning, CS4 will be available in a number of different packages: Master Collection, Production Premium, Web Standard, Web Premium, Design Standard and Design Premium. Each of these is a suite of applications specifically tailored to the needs of professionals in that field. Existing users of CS3 (or earlier versions) can also choose to upgrade or purchase any of their existing stand-alone elements individually.

Released in March of 2007, CS3 continued the legacy of industry-standard creative development applications and remains the staple for most design needs. Its successor comes trumpeting in with a number of new features for their 13 stand-alone products, 14 integrated technologies, and seven services. But the best part of CS4 isn’t its individual parts, but its apparently seamless integration between all products in the line.

This is achieved primarily through Adobe ConnectNow, an online service for real-time collaboration that can be accessed from many of the CS4 applications.

There are a number of feature updates for each of the individual applications in the suites, including the ability to use “tweens” instead of keyframes in Flash CS4 to facilitate precise control over animation attributes. Flash also sports a new tool called the “Bones” tool which allows for realistic animation of linked objects. InDesign users will be happy with the new Live PreFlight tool that can make catching minor errors easier, and Photoshop fans should enjoy the new Content-Aware Scaling tool that can automatically re-compose an image on the fly as you resize it.

Speaking of Photoshop, CS4 offers it in two flavours, the standard and “Extended” versions, which differ slightly in functionality and price. The added features of the “Extended” edition are mainly geared toward those who work in film and other mediums where advanced 3D image manipulation is important. Some of the most exciting “Extended” features are the ability to paint directly on 3D images, rotate and scale 3D models freely, and adjust lighting, meshes, and materials for any of your models.

On the negative side for us Mac folks, Adobe is not shipping 64-bit versions of its CS4 applications for the Mac OS, and is not expected to until CS5 shows up. This is apparently because the applications were originally written in Carbon rather than the Cocoa application framework. And since Apple decided to scrap plans for a 64-bit version of Carbon, all the applications must now be ported to Cocoa before they can continue on their way to a 64-bit release. Adobe is working on it, but they say that it’s no small undertaking and will not be something they will achieve for the release of CS4. I guess that means a few more months of letting Windows users have a 10% performance advantage on us. Darn.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 is scheduled to ship in October, and until then we can enjoy the betas of a couple of the applications including the new Flash Player 10, all of which are now available as free downloads. For more information on the features and functionality of CS4, check out the official site.

Though still labeled as “Beta”, the basic functionality of OpenHuddle is already up and running at full steam, and users are starting to filter in to take a peek at what they’ve got going on. OpenHuddle’s homepage will explain the basics: the entire system functions through multi-functional web application areas called “Rooms” (or “Huddles”), which you can customize and create yourself.

Need a place where you can chat with twelve of your friends while doodling on a whiteboard to really illustrate (my trackpad art skills notwithstanding) your point? Not a problem, just add a whiteboard and chat widget to your Room’s layout space and you’re good to go. If you’re into more direct communication, OpenHuddle also has a fairly robust “Multi-User Video Conferencing” interface which does pretty much what you’d expect it to, except that, because it’s entirely web-based, it’s completely cross-platform compatible so you don’t have to worry about who’s on what. There’s also an audio-only chat option for Skype-like calls, and an instant-message-style text chat widget.

File sharing and collaboration is a necessary feature of these applications, and OpenHuddle acknowledges this by providing extensive file-type support for users. Need to get some comments on a presentation before you go up to perform? Upload your PowerPoint (.PPT) or Flash (.SWF) slideshow file and you’re ready to get comments from everyone in your room in seconds. Ditto for documents, photos, live web clips, and even your desktop! Need to teach someone exactly how to install something or perform certain actions in an application? Why tell them when you can show them with the equivalent of a screencast - right inside their browser.

That’s all great in theory, of course, but how does it all actually work out in the real world? Well, it turns out that it performs quite speedily considering everything that’s going on within a single browser instance. The video chat was a little choppy in my experience (using the Macbook Pro’s built-in iSight camera and mic), and the text chat had some occasional delays in publishing a message, but not enough to be considered anything but an annoyance. The interface is indeed very customizable, though it may not be immediately clear how it works. The file and desktop sharing worked as advertised and, on a Mac, you’ll be asked to download a small Java applet which will allow you to specify whether you want to share your entire screen or just a section of it, which is actually very smart.

All of this functionality begs the question of how secure the whole enterprise is, and the answer is “not very”. The system seems more tailored to casual, friendly kinds of conversations between friends or family; it’s far too open and publicly-accessible to be of much use for business users hoping for a private meeting room, even though you can apply some basic access restrictions to your Room.

All in all, OpenHuddle has taken an important pioneering step for the web applications industry and it proves that this kind of cross-platform collaboration is indeed possible. Once they come out of beta and work out a few kinks in the system, I think that there will be a large market waiting for them. Head on over to OpenHuddle.com to check it out for yourself, and let us know how you think the service is coming along!

Mellel greets you with an interface that is, shall we say, familiar. The developers have decided to adopt Word’s interesting format of having your document in one window and a tool panel separately in another window, which includes pretty much everything you’d want to do to your document (from Office for Mac). Similar to Word, the tool panel is divided into helpful tabs which contain the functions related to its title. For example, the “Alignment and Spacing” tab will give you access to controls for aligning your text and defining the spacing of your paragraphs and between lines of text.

The tool panel is functional, if somewhat perplexing because of its separate window existence. While I found it to be very convenient to have every major operation available from a single window, I question the need to actually separate it into the “floating” dialogue that Mellel provides. I had the same misgiving about Office for Mac’s version of Word, and I’m worried to see that other developers are adopting this particular design choice, even though some may prefer it to the integrated ribbon bar found in the latest version of Word’s Windows counterpart.

Perhaps for the sake of an uncluttered page window interface, Mellel does not offer the typical New, Open, Print, and Save buttons that most other word processors provide as part of their main toolbar. These options are still accessible from the File menu, of course, and I didn’t really miss having the extra buttons. In fact, the only things that you will find on the page window of Mellel is a zoom control, a table generation button, a central window providing information on the text style, and buttons for Left, Right, Center, and Justified text alignment.

The interface similarities between Mellel and Word do not extend as far as the program’s skin, though, which is outfitted in a drab, gunmetal-gray that may be a little bit unfavorable for users who are not fond of having a distinctly military aesthetic about their writing environments.

The way Mellel’s website talks about it, you’d think that it was what God used to write the ten commandments or something. Not only does RedleX give a “Competitive Comparison” chart, which I’ll get to in a moment, but they also have a page with the “Top Ten Reasons to Switch to Mellel,” which begins, modestly, with “Mellel is the best word processor for Mac OSX.” There is a fine line between arrogance and ambition, and Mellel treads on it with gusto.

Some of the items on the Top Ten list are strong arguments, such as the claim that Mellel will not crash, even under the strain of extremely long documents (which it was apparently designed to handle efficiently). I myself tested it with some challenging documents (200+ page theatrical scripts with storyboard images, novel manuscripts, etc.) and did not manage to crash it or even significantly slow it down, which was impressive. It also provides an interesting “secondary font” option which allows users to mix languages in the text fluently, with full support for OpenType language options.

Other items are not as convincing. Saying that Mellel can deal with footnotes and endnotes is not exactly an innovative feature revelation, and the fact that they’ve required no less than 16 “major updates” in just three years is hardly a selling point. Nevertheless, Mellel’s got some great things going for it, which their extensive comparison chart helps to illustrate.

The chart, as mentioned above, is part of Mellel’s loud-mouthed advertising and provides an in-depth comparison between Mellel, Word, Open Office, and NisusWriter Express. Without going into unnecessary detail, the chart highlights some significant positive attributes, including an extremely fast launch time, resource-efficient operation, and a good array of features and file-type compatibilities. On the other hand, the lack of important features like password-protection, spellcheck exclusions and multiple language support, different page sizes in one document, intelligent tables, and a number of graphics limitations is difficult to ignore.

Add to that the fact that the chart was created using results from last-generation versions of the competing software and you may start to question the credibility of its data, which obviously favors Mellel. RedleX graciously admits to this though, saying about the chart: “What is it good for? Not much, except for getting a general impression.”

Despite its shortcomings, Mellel truly is an ambitious and competent word processor, and its nimble operation and spartan interface may appeal to those looking for an efficient writing environment with bells and whistles that are present without being distracting. Mellel is available from RedleX for $49.00 for a standard license, $64.00 for a boxed edition (including shipping charges), or $35.00 for an educational license. Any purchase comes with 2 years of free updates, free email support, and some tutorials and guides.

I enjoyed my experience with Mellel, but I can’t say I was thrilled enough to consider switching to it as my primary word processor. Have your own Mellel experiences to share? We’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Think helps us rediscover the long lost art of focusing by trying to keep the myriad distractions on your screen from actually interrupting your concentration. It does this using a method very similar to the tried-and-tested ways you might remember from writing apps like WriteRoom. Specifically, Think creates a sort of backdrop over your entire desktop, and places behind it all programs other than the one you’ve selected, leaving you with a cleaner visual environment that’ll help keep you focused on the highlighted application. Unlike its similar cousin Backdrop, though, Think does not necessarily obscure the other windows entirely; it can simply mask them with a translucent veil that keeps them from being too aggravating.

The interface is intuitive and simple – striving to be as unobtrusive as possible, in keeping with the app’s general ideology of no distractions. When you open Think, you’re confronted with a panel that lets you choose which application you’d like to be highlighted, or “illuminated” as Freeverse puts it. Once you’ve selected a program all the others are shoved behind the backdrop, and you’re left with nothing but your illuminated program and Think’s subtle control panel.

The control panel is a useful device that allows you to change the colour and transparency of the backdrop, bring up the application selection panel again, or quit Think altogether. The application selection panel will also pop back up automatically if you quit the illuminated application. If you need to look at another window as well, besides your selected one, you can simply use Cmd-Tab or select it from your dock and Think will pull it up above the backdrop. Then, when you’re done with it, simply click anywhere on the backdrop and Think automatically returns you to just your highlighted program.

A very neat little feature that one might not notice is the actual Think icon in the Dock. When you have a program illuminated, its icon is shown inside Think’s icon to remind you of which app you have highlighted. Advanced users should also make sure to look at the Goodies tab on the Think website for instructions on how to use the Terminal to tweak some additional “advanced” settings for the app, including transparency settings for the control panel (including mouse over settings) and even the ability to remove the control panel entirely.

Think is available for OS X 10.4.9 or later and can be downloaded for free from Freeverse’s product page.

Meanwhile, way down at the base of the ivory tower of professional photography, dedicated amateur shutterbugs (like myself) are left to wonder what we’re to do with our own collections, which are slowly but inexorably bursting through iPhoto’s seams. Sure, iPhoto is a great solution for managing a modest collection of photos and doing all the basic editing and categorizing that such collections require; but if you’re more interested in efficient and speedy organization than you are in the ability to make calendars, then you owe it to yourself to take a look at Shoebox, another wonderful product from KavaSoft.

Shoebox is described as “the solution for organizing all of your photos by content,” and in the simplest of terms, that’s exactly what it does. But stop me if this sounds familiar: what’s the difference between this content-based organization and iPhoto’s keywords? The answer lies primarily in Shoebox’s incredibly convenient ability to teach Spotlight how to recognize photos based on the content tags you’ve assigned them from within the program. And when I say “content”, I don’t just mean the equivalent of iPhoto’s Events  I mean actual content: do you want to keep track of all your photos that have teapots in them, regardless of when they were taken or by what camera? Perhaps you want only blue teapots taken by your trusty Nikon? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere.

If there’s one thing the folks at KavaSoft are good at, it’s making a good first impression. As soon as you open Shoebox you’ll find yourself presented with a neat, unified, and familiar design that offers you a number of buttons which will help you get started in creating your collection. For my part, I already had my photo collection sitting around in iPhoto, so I clicked the appropriate import button and within seconds (literally, it was amazingly fast) I had my entire collection smiling up at me from its new home. I was happy until I remembered how long it took me to organize them in iPhoto in the first place. Okay, I thought, here we go again. Then I took a closer look and realized that Shoebox had already taken all my albums and converted them to its own categories. Not only that, but it also took my keywords and brought them over undamaged; ready to serve again as the beginning of my new content-based organizational scheme. Even my ratings made the jump without a hitch. I didn’t have to start over with anything at all; I could just carry on organizing from where iPhoto left off.

The main interface presents you with a few different viewing options: there’s a Category Browser (everyone’s favourite iTunes-style system for viewing your collection), a Folder Browser (same thing only for your entire hard drive), a Search Browser, and even a very interesting Camera Browser that lets you view the photos on your connected camera without importing them immediately. In fact, you can even run a slideshow of them straight from your camera or memory card, without any need to import them into your library. For now though, I went with the default Category Browser which showed me my newly-imported collection as a series of thumbnails, with all the categories and albums shown up above in the columns pane. For adding more precise content tags to all of my photos though, I wanted a larger view of them so that I wasn’t stuck squinting at thumbnails. So I activated the slideshow view, which displays one picture at a time in the lower pane, and I got started.

What should have been a tedious process was actually remarkably painless. Starting with the first photo, I’d take a look and see what was in the picture, tack on some keywords at the end of the blue-bubble list of existing categorization, and I was off to the next picture. New categories were created on the fly from what I typed in, and if I came across another photo that fit into an existing category, Shoebox helpfully displayed the possibility in a drop-down menu as I typed. Admittedly, this process could take a significant amount of time if you’re working with a library of thousands of photographs, but the results are certainly worth it as you’ll soon see.

Having organized my photos more precisely, I decided to see just how I could make use of these categories. From the category browser, I found that it was now ridiculously simple to find the exact image that I was looking for from my collection, or have it narrowed down to a list of appropriate alternatives. My favourite feature of the interface comes in the form of KavaSoft’s clever use of mini progress bars beside the category name to indicate the relative number of photos in that category. It’s a remarkably simple but potentially useful piece of visual feedback and I’m hoping that it’ll catch on. Another intelligent feature related to the categories is something called Aliases, which allows you to teach Shoebox about the relationships between your custom content categories so that it can display search results even more intelligently. For example, you can teach it that Christmas happens every year, so that searching for Christmas photos doesn’t just turn up a single year’s album. I should also mention the inclusion of an interesting new way to browse through your collection: something that KavaSoft has called “Surfing.” Surfing through your photos basically involves clicking a little arrow beside any of the items in a photo’s information pane. What this does is it calls up any other photos in your library that conform to the same criteria, which is a nice and quick way to locate similar photos without performing a separate search.

Speaking of searching, if you make use of the Search Browser and set up a complex search for all those blue teapots taken with your trusy Nikon, chances are good that you won’t want to have to re-enter the criteria every time you need to see that particular spread of photos. For cases just like this, Shoebox allows you to create a Smart Folder that contains all the photos that are turned up by your particular search. This Smart Folder is then available for you to browse at your leisure  even outside of Shoebox with Finder! Searches and simple browsing also feature the ability to filter the pictures that are displayed by criteria such as rating, date, categories, camera, etc. And, of course, you can also keep track of all your most-visited albums within Shoebox by adding them to your Favourites.

Something that becomes increasingly important as your collection of photos grows is that you have a backup for it. Shoebox may not give you any options in the way of sending albums off for publication or making pretty calendars with them (like iPhoto does), but it DOES allow you to burn photos to disc in order to keep them backed up. More than that, it actually has a feature that will have laptop users jumping for joy (okay, so maybe it’s just me): once you’ve backed up your photo library onto DVDs or CDs, you can tell Shoebox to keep nothing but a smaller version of each photo  perfect for quick viewing on the go  on your hard drive so that you’re not stuck taking up huge amounts of precious drive real estate when you don’t have to. Then, of course, when you pop the backup disc back in, Shoebox automatically reverts to displaying the full-sized pictures straight from the disc. And if you happen to have a portion of your collection that you’d rather wasn’t publicly viewable to anyone who opens Shoebox, you can create private catalogs of photos which are password protected. These private catalogs also disappear from your recently viewed items and history; perfect for helping what happened in Vegas STAY in Vegas.

It’s likely that if you’re an image enthusiast, you may have access to two monitors. If this happens to be the case, then you can make especially good use of Shoebox’s fullscreen view because (in addition to the standard thumbnails, list, and slideshow that single-monitored users have access to) you’ll also be able to display thumbnails on one monitor and the fullscreen image on the second, or any combination you like.

So here we come to the crux of the issue: who’s Shoebox for and what can it do for you? Well, the answer is actually a lot easier to reach than you might expect. First off, if you’re looking for anything in the way of image editing or publishing options, then you should probably stick to iPhoto because that’s where it’s at. If, however, you’re a photographer with a giant collection of photos who’s just looking for a way to quickly and conveniently index, sort, and organize your collection, then Shoebox is your new best friend. As it turns out, Shoebox is likely the best solution even for the professional photographer when it comes to organization of photos. Sure, it might not have the added editing features of Aperture or Lightroom, but if all you’re looking for is an efficient way to manage your collection, then you can save yourself a lot of money by clicking over to the Shoebox homepage. The Shoebox license is available in two separate formats: you can either buy the “Express” version for $30 (which lets you import a maximum of 10,000 photos) or you can go for Shoebox “Pro”, which lets you import an unlimited number of photos.

My experience with Shoebox has been almost entirely positive so far. Let us know how it’s worked for you!

Well, if you were to pose that question to the folks over at Jabber.org, they’d probably start by explaining that their alternative service is open and decentralized, meaning that there’s no corporate “overlord” monitoring all of your chat activities; and then they’d probably touch on the resulting security improvements and the fact that you are therefore free from having to pay for the service or be bombarded by advertisements. Somewhere along the way, they’d probably convince you to check out what they’ve got to offer, and if you’d navigate to the portion of their site where they list a variety of Jabber clients, you’d see one called Psi near the top of the list.

The Psi project was founded way back in 2001 with the goal of creating the best light-weight but fully-featured IM client for the Jabber network. Because everything is open, the client has since, at the hands of numerous volunteers, matured into an extremely efficient and flexible instant messaging technology. Its user base now includes millions of Mac, Windows, and Linux users worldwide, and Psi has helped inspire many corporate and educational institutions to switch to the Jabber network for their communications.

So why Psi? Perhaps the main reason that Psi has become so popular is the fact that one of the project’s main goals was always accessibility. Besides the fact that the client has been optimized to run like a charm on all three major operating systems, it’s also got the added advantage of having been diligently translated into more than twenty different languages by dedicated users worldwide, so that you can feel at home with Psi no matter where you are. This linguistic versatility has an added dimension though: Psi also has full support for the Unicode international text standard, so that users can converse using symbols and accents without a problem  even if the text is running right-to-left!

Then you’ve got security. Psi recognizes that sometimes you’re going to be chatting from unsecured networks like public WiFi hotspots, so it makes use of the robust SSL cryptographic technology that powers many online shopping platforms in order to safely encrypt all chat communications. Psi also includes support for OpenPGP message encryption protocols for more advanced security needs.

But Psi wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful and popular as it is if it wasn’t user-friendly too, so it should come as no surprise that the client is fully customizable; you can change and replace everything from the colours and emoticons to the client skins and icons. Even keyboard shortcuts and toolbars can be modified to suit your personal chatting needs. The best part is that the variety of these modifications is constantly expanding and evolving as Psi’s thriving community continues to put out hundreds of solutions, all completely free.

In seven years of development, project leader Justin Karneges and the rest of the development team have learned that paying attention to your users is a great way to keep them happy. As a result, the Psi project is constantly implementing new developments that have been requested, in an effort to keep their client ideal for as many users as possible. Need the ability to have multi-user chats? Psi can do that. Need to be able to perform remote client control operations? Not a problem for Psi. Herein lies one of Psi’s greatest advantages: the fact that its development is so responsive to the needs of its community.

Now inevitably, as Mac users, we will all raise an eyebrow at this point and say, “oh really?” as we glance over to the cheerful green bird that handles so many of our chatting needs: Adium. How does Psi compare to Adium? Is it worth switching? Is the icon as cute? But it’s important to realize that a comparison between Psi and Adium is inherently flawed, because the two clients are made for different things. It’s like comparing toasters and microwave ovens: sure, they both heat things up, but they’re used for different purposes. Likewise, Psi and Adium are both chat clients, but they’re not aiming for the same crowd.

Adium is a robust, Mac-centred chat platform that’s built to be able to connect to just about every possible chat protocol under the sun; from the corporate giant clients to Jabber and more. It tries to do this in the most feature-rich and flexible way possible and, arguably, it succeeds. Psi, on the other hand, is a cross-platform solution that focuses its efforts entirely on Jabber. It doesn’t even try to support the others because the whole point of the project is to further the advancement of the Jabber networks. It tries to do this while keeping computer resource consumption as modest as possible, even though it also does its best to be as flexible as can be.

So, in the end, Psi can be said to succeed at what it’s trying to do. After all, after seven years in the game, it’s hard to deny that they must be doing something right. It may not be as service-friendly as Adium, but it’s not trying to be. Psi is a powerful, efficient, accessible, and popular Jabber client with an active community of developers and supporters, and a responsive production team. If you’re looking for a Jabber-only chatting solution that will keep you in touch with other Jabberers (Jabberians? Jabbies?) no matter what OS they’re using, then you could do a whole lot worse than Psi. It’s available for download (free, of course) from the project’s website, and you’ll also find a huge selection of customizations with a quick Google search.

Chatting is an important part of our online lives; tell us about your experiences with Psi: Do you use it? Would you use it over Adium if you could? Are you a fan of an entirely different client? Let us know!

You may have noticed, incidentally, that this article has a nifty new subtitle. This isn’t because we’re hinting that the new Macs are fruity; rather, the subtitle comes from the fact that MacApper is expanding its content to include editorial material  the first example of which is this very column, Apples and Oranges. News commentary, software experience reviews, and healthy doses of sarcasm will likely find their way into the column, which yours truly will henceforth inhabit.

But I digress. Back to the Mac:

New Books, Not-So-New Looks

It seems that Apple’s design team was busy watching the Oscars or something when they were supposed to be meeting to discuss possible design improvements. Either that, or they’re under the impression that they’ve reached a pinnacle of laptop design standards that has no flaws worth noticing. The impressive thing is that they may actually be right.

In any case, don’t expect any major design revisions with the new MacBooks; they look more or less identical to their freshly-outdated siblings of the previous generation. Sleek is still the power word here, and the MacBook Pro especially looks like something an aesthetically-conscious chef would use to mince vegetables with.

Or maybe I’m thinking of the MacBook Air. The mainstream MacBooks and their Pro counterparts are still about an inch thick, so while you might not be able to use them as competent cooking utensils (or envelope stuffers), you may be able to rest a bit more easily because you won’t have to worry about having them snap in half if you should sneeze too hard in their general direction. The weight has also remained about the same, with the heaviest of the bunch still weighing in at an admirably anorexic 5.4 pounds.

It would be unfair to talk about the MacBooks’ design without mentioning their nifty back-lit LED screens: the brightest, most energy-efficient, and environmentally friendly displays around. How can a laptop display be environmentally friendly, you ask? Well because the new LED variety found on the MacBook and MacBook Pro are now fully Mercury-free. Think of it like a “Low Cholesterol!” marking on that carton of eggs you just bought  it doesn’t actually mean anything, but it’s good advertising. Score one for the Apple Marketing Division.

The keyboards are as comfortable and soft as ever, with the MacBook’s keys sitting flush against the body for a nice low profile and typing that doesn’t make your $1200 laptop sound like an antique typewriter with arthritis. The unbelievably useful back-lighting is also back in force, with an intuitive sensor that can tell when you need the feature most: it lights up the keys whenever you pass your hand over the laptop, or lean forward; but keeps them resolutely off if you should, say, be in a dark place.

It seems as though, for better or for worse, the design team decided to take the old adage to heart: “Don’t fix what ain’t broke.”

That’s Touching, Really

Though some of the components look the same, Apple has managed to sneak in some brand new functionality. The track-pad is the example I’ve got in mind, and it’s truly one of those innovations that has a lot of potential.

Just like the recently-released MacBook Air, the new generations of MacBooks and MacBook Pros have advanced track-pads which feature more sophisticated recognition algorithms, meaning that you can now perform more complex gestures such as pinches and rotation to trigger various corresponding effects.

To be specific, you can pinch and expand to zoom in and out on photos, scroll by holding two fingers and sliding up or down, “swipe” by using three or more fingers and sliding across the track-pad, rotating images by placing two fingers on the track-pad and performing various uncomfortable motions with your wrist, hitting the “Control” button, placing two fingers on the track-pad and sliding them up or down to zoom the entire screen in and out…you get my drift. Clearly, this is a machine for the hands-on learners of the world.

Besides the obvious benefits to your productivity, this intelligent track-pad opens up a whole new world of interactivity for the Mac gaming world. Stop laughing, I mean it. “Marius, you naive idiot,” I hear you cry out; but I am quite serious. Just imagine the kinds of fun game developers could have if they started designing games to take advantage of this added level of interactivity: it’s like having a Nintendo DS built straight into your laptop!

Plug ‘n Play

One thing you’re familiar with, if you happen to be a happy MacBook user like myself (MacBook Pro, to be precise), is the fact that the laptop features a surprisingly complete palette of connectivity options considering its sleek and smooth design principles. 3 USB 2.0 ports (on the 17-inch model), 1 FireWire 400 and 1 FireWire 800 port, a Gigabit Ethernet Port, an ExpressCard slot, DVI-out, Audio in, Audio out…clearly, we’re dealing with one friendly machine here.

And the best part is that the new versions feature much-improved wireless network connection capabilities which conform to 802.11n standards  that’s 5x faster and supports twice the range of previous generations. This makes things like chatting and emailing a breeze, even when participating in crowded video conferencing sessions. Sending files to a wireless printer is effortless, and backing up your data wirelessly with Time Machine no longer requires you to go off and read a Dostoyevsky novel while you wait for it to finish.

And what would a discussion on MacBook connectivity be without a mention of their ingenious, ditz-safe power cord? It plugs in magnetically so you don’t have to worry about tripping over it and pulling your whole laptop down off its perch. The idea is actually brilliant and I have to confess that I spent a little too much time playing with it in idle fascination when I first unpacked my MacBook Pro.

My one biggest complaint with it is that it doesn’t actually make that satisfying popping noise that it does in the videos. I studied them and scrutinized, but no matter how I tried, I could not reproduce the satisfying sound when disconnecting the cord. It felt kind of like being a kid and waiting eagerly to play with a roll of bubble-wrap, only to discover that the bubbles just hiss feebly when punctured. I don’t know if maybe it’s just my specific machine that came pre-set with a pop-silencing feature, but I would have already written to Apple to complain if only I could keep a straight face while drafting the letter.

Penryn Performance

Let’s take a brief look under the hood and see the brand new guts that power Apple’s new generation MacBooks and MacBook Pros. The first thing that’s special is the new processors: Intel’s blazingly fast “Penryn” Core 2 Duo chip which, to quote the Apple site:

…runs on 45-nm process technology at speeds up to 2.6GHz with up to 6MB of L2 cache. Its SSE4 vector engine handles 128-bit computations in a single clock cycle, accelerating data manipulation by simultaneously applying a single instruction to multiple data.

In English, that means that it does the whole processing thing really really fast. Which is a good thing, because it means you can do all your complex video rendering, audio reverb calculations, and photo filter applications more than 50% faster than you could before. And let’s not forget the RAM, which can be upgraded to up to 4GB of DDR2, running at 667MHz (on the Macbook Pro. The Macbook can have up to 2GB).

The video card that powers the entire visual affair is NVIDIA’s GeForce 8600M GT (again, on the Macbook Pro) which can include up to 512MB of GDDR3 dedicated memory. With the ability to operate in a colossal 1680×1050 screen resolution, full-quality HD video viewing is no longer a worry  say goodbye to window re-sizing.

The hard drives have also been beefed up, so that you now have a variety of options for drive size and speed available to you for each of the various models of MacBook and MacBook Pro. Sadly, the highest speed is still just 7200-rpm, which is a bit on the stunted side when it comes to working with high-quality audio samples or reading/writing massive amounts of HD-video data to the disk.

Contrary to what you might expect with such serious hardware powering the system, the MacBook still claims to have a lengthy 4.5-hour battery life, while the 15-inch MacBook Pro can apparently last for 5 hours, including active wireless productivity.

Hello, World!

Thus, with open arms, I welcome the new generation of Mac notebooks as we look forward to seeing peoples’ responses to the updates that Apple has provided. In the meantime, more details about the new MacBook and MacBook Pro can be found on their respective product pages, which include detailed technical specs and far more professional custom graphics than my own.

Until next time,

- Marius “Macbook” Masalar

And that’s just with personal relationships  what about professional relationships, where sometimes the extent of your contact with an individual is a series of digital transactions?

Jumsoft jumps to the rescue with an update to one of its award-winning pieces of productivity software, aptly named Relationship. This little gem is a piece of customer relationship management software geared towards the small business market. With its attractive price tag and competitive features, it’s easily established itself as a staple of the consumer corporate world, and the 1.1 update brings only improvements to the tried-and-tested formula for success.

When we originally reviewed Relationship last year, the software was still in its fledgling state, and many of its ambitious features had not yet been fleshed out to their full potential. With the release of version 1.1, Jumsoft has endeavored to streamline their practical one-window interface (in keeping with what seems to be an increasingly popular trend in software design) and speed up the response times for everything from searching old data records to importing new ones.

This speed boost is especially evident when working with larger numbers of stored contacts. Relationship has also retained its ability to import records in the form of VCards and tab-delimited files which can then be organized using classic features like colour labeling.

One of the most acclaimed features of the original Relationship was its integration with the Mac’s native Address Book, and Jumsoft has expanded upon this integration by allowing users to effectively manage their contacts entirely from within Relationship: from basic information-gathering, to advanced scheduling and mass-emailing capabilities that work seamlessly together to ensure that you’ve got everything you need at your fingertips.

The ability to create groups and “Smart Groups” based on any criteria you like makes keeping people organized a breeze  and each of these groups can be customized with an infinite number of user-defined columns and sub-columns for additional information. Not to mention the ability to attach files and add notes to any contact or group.

If there’s one thing that relationships thrive on, it’s collaboration. And Jumsoft  perceptive fellows that they are  have added a brand new feature allowing different users to collaborate over the Bonjour network. Perhaps the most obvious thing that a relationship needs, though, is security. Relationship is up to par on this account as well, as the update includes the ability to back up all your data securely to your .Mac account. This addition helps augment the previously-existing ability to password protect the entire application, or simply individual groups containing more sensitive data.

Relationship is available for download from Jumsoft’s website either individually for $39.00, or as part of their excellent Business Trio package (which includes the latest versions of Relationship, Money, and Operation) for $59.00. When it comes to managing customer relations for your small business, consider Jumsoft’s Relationship and become your own PR Department.

If you already have, why not tell us how the experience has been for you? How does this Address Book usurper cope with your small (or large) business’ needs?

What it doesn’t generally do is force them to be more aware of their moral boundaries. One software developer, named Reza Hussain, decided to be a bit more ambitious in his design.

Much to the chagrin of numerous eager users, it was discovered that his seemingly-innocuous screen capture program called Display Eater had a much bigger appetite than they expected: if a pirated serial number was entered during registration, the software would delete the offending user’s home files; effectively killing their poor Mac.

Display Eater is intended as a very practical, easy-to-use and streamlined piece of software for doing live video screen captures and storing them as clips, which can later be compiled and saved as a QuickTime video. In addition, it includes the option to use custom cursors in the clips, or no cursor at all. All of this sounds like it would make for a useful program, but what isn’t expected from the get-go is that Mr. Hussain also included some questionable lines of code which perform the dirty deletion deed.

Hang on, you say, but isn’t that a bit archaic? Sure, pirating software is bad, but when did it become the responsibility of developers to include and execute such brutal punishments against their own users? Therein lies the problem, and the spark of a great deal of controversy which now surrounds this particular utility. The threat is included in the original license for the software, and many legitimate users who downloaded it were downright scared by such draconian methods; they began purchasing multiple licenses just to be on the safe side, and those who weren’t too sure what piracy even is avoided the software entirely.

Because this controversy first came up exactly one year ago, with the software’s original release, it has become difficult to find up-to-date information regarding the functionality of this bizarre app. It seems, from various sources that I’ve come across, that the developer responded to the numerous complaints and open letters by stating that the threat in the license was actually a hollow one, intended simply as a tactic to scare potential pirates away. Somehow, he didn’t expect that all the other users would also be scared  quite probably more so  by these threats. As one user, Mark Grimes, aptly commented, “Wow, he charges money for malware  that's a novel concept!”

And he’s not the only one who shares that view. Blake C., another commentator, expands on that and points out a glaring logical error in the scheme:

Purposefully inflicting damage on a user should be a crime if it's not already. Assuming it's not, purposefully inflicting damage based on pure mathematics should be. How can the developer prove that the original licensed user actually gave away his SN to anyone? Assuming for a second that this app *does not* display the SN to anyone who opens the About box, how does the developer know that the licensed user didn't just write the number somewhere and someone else grabbed it? And now, after months of paid-for usage, and no illegal action, the customer finds his home directory nuked.

Various other commentators have pointed out that, either way, such anti-piracy measures don’t dissuade software pirates: if they want to pirate the software, they’ll find a way to do it anyway, and then the only real result will be that the normal user’s experience with the software will be less positive. The focus, they argue, should be on providing more useful features as opposed to thickening the code with ultimately-ineffective fail-safes.

In an extremely useful entry on his blog, the commentator Blake C. from above dedicated some time to doing a massively-detailed, step-by-step deconstruction of Display Eater’s code in an attempt to figure out and explain exactly what’s going on there. The end result of that analysis was best summed up in the closing lines:

So there it is. Display Eater recursively deletes the contents of its own Application Support folder(but not the folder itself), and nothing else. If the user was silly enough to put anything in that folder, it would have been nuked. But in that case, one might argue that they deserved it. But that only refers to version 1.85 of the software. In an open letter to the developer, the question was posed of whether or not other versions of the software actually did do any serious deleting. The reply was prompt and to-the-point:

Version 1.85 was the only release to feature deletion.

Version 1.85 was released three times: Version 1 had no deletion, version 2 had home folder deletion, and version 3 had display eater preferences deletion.

So it seems that Display Eater’s notoriety was more the result of intentional bad press than actual truth. This whole story leaves us with an interesting look at what happens when a developer tries to take the law into his own hands to prevent software piracy. Clearly, the intent was noble enough, but the actual application employed draconian scare tactics which only served to destroy the reputation of the software and the developer himself.

As a last response to all of this turmoil, Reza Hussein decided to release a free key for Display Eater which would effectively make the software free. However, this apparently wasn’t enough: the home of this app used to be found at http://reversecode.com, but it seems that the site has since been taken down, leaving only a barren file directory which serves as a glaring message to all other software developers of the dangers involved in trying to be too judgmental with their code.

A quick Google search will reveal some remaining download locations for Display Eater, including the Apple Downloads site, and ZDNet for those of you who are still willing to risk a look. The trial will allow you one minute of recording per clip and the license originally cost $17.00. Until the open-source release, you can go here to find the Serial Number that Reza released for users to unlock the software for free.

If you happen to be looking for a screen-capture alternative that doesn’t require you to wade through piles of propaganda, then check out iShowU or Snapz Pro X.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple solution to keep track of all your recipes in a single zesty application on your computer? Say hello to Yum, the appropriately-named recipe organization tool for your Mac.

Produced by NIXANZ, the Leopard-ready Yum creates a digital archive of all your myriad recipes, which can then be tagged and stored in categories for easy retrieval. Sporting a Spotlight-esque, live-updating search feature, Yum even lets you import any recipes that you may have archived using the paid, Windows-only, MasterCook. Recipes can be formatted, grouped, printed, exported as text files, and adorned with helpful graphics, giving you full control over every aspect of your culinary chronicles.

Users are able to define ingredients and amounts and can describe the cooking method however they need to – there is no strict form-based information input. Everything is intuitive and open-ended, letting you create and organize your recipes however you prefer.

Because of its tag-based organization scheme, you’ll never have trouble finding similar recipes again. The ability to print recipes individually, all together, or by category is very important if you don’t happen to keep your computer in your kitchen. You could, conceivably, turn your Macbook into a Ma-Cook-Book, but it turns out that advanced computing technology does not take to egg-yolk stains quite as well as its paper predecessors did.

Yum is not only free, but available under the author’s own proprietary “UNDER-Ware” (User Now Defines Entity Restrictions) licensing, which means you can download and distribute it more or less however you wish, as long as you remember the UNDER-Ware motto: “Your UNDER-Ware should be comfortable.” Incidentally, the software also comes with the author’s own personal collection (of recipes, that is) which includes a rather scrumptious Mexican Wallaby Steak method.

All cuisine lovers are encouraged to grab a copy of Yum and get cooking. Bon appetit!

Editors Note: We have also reviewed YummySoup, Connoisseur, and Measuring Cup recently. Check out the reviews!

Sure, you’ve got the improved Finder and Spotlight to work with, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a magic word that could whisk you out of the Finder’s strict folder-based hierarchical structure?

Thanks to the fledging software developer nudge:nudge, there is. The magic word is “tagging” and the wand you can cast it with is their brand new, open-source file management solution called Punakea. Punakea is designed to complement Spotlight by giving you the option of assigning “tags” to any file. These tags act exactly the same way as their internet-based cousins do, and allow you to keep track of files across your system – even if they’re buried deep in different folders.

Not only that, but you can also add multiple tags to a single file – as many as you need. This allows you to create an intricate, yet intuitive array of interconnected files. Want to find every file you used to research that last presentation? No problem. Looking for all the pictures in your album taken by one particular camera? Easy. Trying to keep track of which documents are ready to publish on your blog and which are still in-progress? Punakea’s got you covered.

When it comes to simplifying the file-browsing experience, there are few applications out there that offer the elegance of Punakea’s tagging solution. And the best news is that, unlike its competition, Leap, it’s completely free. Now that you know the magic word, go pick up your copy of the wand over at Punakea’s website and take charge of your file system!

And with the release of their new Trinity expansion, this game world is finally open to Mac (and Linux) users everywhere.

So, do you have an adventurous bone in your body that’s calling out for a gigantic new universe to explore? Or do you have the skills to manipulate the player-based economy of EVE to build your own galactic corporate empire? Perhaps you’ve always been drawn to a life of piracy? Whatever your calling, EVE Online delivers. With 5,000 individual solar systems — each with its own planets and stations, and each planet with its own moons and asteroid belts — the possibilities are virtually limitless. The new Trinity expansion also features a major graphics overhaul, and space has never looked so gorgeous.

When CCP designed EVE, they were dreaming of a new generation of MMOs which could break out of the previous constraints of the genre. No longer would they have to split their game world in to several identical “shards” in order to accommodate all their players; instead, the world of EVE Online takes place in a single, epic game world. And the level of inter-personal interactivity really pays off in gameplay terms. With the ability to form and join corporations which are thousands of members strong, EVE provides extremely rewarding gameplay. Its player-driven economy ensures that every sale and every purchase affects every other player, so all citizens of EVE are constantly contributing to the game’s universe.

If you’re a fan of sci-fi and long for a game to satisfy your warp-drive wants, look no further than EVE Online. It may just be the largest game release that the Mac world has seen to date.

You can try it out for free for the first 14 days, after which a monthly subscription fee is necessary to continue playing. For more information, including specific system requirements, visit EVE Online.

MacSaber is probably the most unconventional use of your Macbook’s (or Macbook Pro’s) sudden-motion sensor technology, utilizing it to trigger authentic light-saber sound effects that can even sense how fast or slow you swing your ($2,000) laptop around. This app is probably the most fun you’ll ever have with your Macbook and brings a whole new dimension to the corporate cubicle battlefield.

Best of all, it’s completely free, which should help you save some money for when you discover that you may have used a little bit too much Force for that last swing. You can pick up a copy of the latest version from iSnoop’s blog page. No word yet on whether or not “Light-saber Battles” are covered by warranty.

Enter Simple Comic; a robust yet streamlined reader for digitized comic books saved as archive files of the type .CBR, .CBZ, .RAR, and others. Produced by Dancing Tortoise Software, this compact piece of open-source wonder provides all the functionality of its older cousin Comical, without the added feature of intermittent crashing.

In fact, besides stability, it also trumps the competition by providing a few extra tools. My favourite was the “Image Loupe,” a clever little magnifying glass that lets you take a closer peek at a specific section of the page without having to zoom the entire screen in (which you can also do, by the way). Coupled with page scaling, rotating, ordering (left-to-right or vice-versa for fans of manga), and full-screen viewing capabilities, Simple Comic gives you all the options you need to experience your comics your way.

In addition, the ability to open multiple different comics at one time can make comparisons and research a breeze. Not only that, but the full-screen thumbnail view allows you to quickly browse through all the pages in an archive and zip straight to the one you need, without the hassle of flipping through everything page by page to search. And when you’re done and decide to close the program, it automatically bookmarks your last position and re-opens directly to it on the next launch. Convenient.

Simple Comic is completely free and is fully compatible with Leopard. You can download it from Dancing Tortoise’s Website (lava lamp not included).