MacApper » Ryan Smith

Dear MacJournal, Today I Reviewed You

Ryan Smith — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:52:28 +0000

Simply put, MacJournal is a tool for journaling and capturing notes. But, MacJournal is more than just a diary. Features such as PDF and image support, password protection, encryption, tagging, full screen mode, and a publish to blog feature make MacJournal a versatile application.

The interface will be familiar to most users. You create a new entry, type the information you wish to capture, and format it as desired. A sidebar displays your various journals, should you want to classify entries under different subjects. There is also a calendar to review entries by date.

The inspector palette allows quick access to several options, including document settings, date, tags, annotations, various status settings, star ratings, labels, and many other options. These features make MacJournal an excellent choice for anyone looking to add more organization to their system and make their files more searchable.

In addition, MacJournal contains a send to blog button, that reportedly works with many popular platforms. I was able to setup and post an entry to blogger in seconds, simply by knowing my blog address, username, and password.

MacJournal is an exceptional application for writing a journal, storing notes, and keeping tabs on other files. MacJournal is in its fifth major release, with an all new interface for Leopard (and it also runs on OS 10.4). A license runs you $34.95. You can download a trial of the app here.

Stellarium: A Planetarium for your Mac

Ryan Smith — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:29:24 +0000

With thousands of stars viewable to the naked eye, finding the Pleiades, or even figuring out what that bright star near the horizon is, takes a fair bit of research, unless you have a planetarium at your disposal. Until Apple unveils the iPlanetarium, I'm recommending Stellarium.

Open source app Stellarium is a planetarium for your Mac. Stellarium shows you the stars in a beautiful and fun to play with interface. The only thing that looks better is the real night sky.

From the settings dialogue you can set your location (anywhere on Earth), change the time (to see what the stars will look like later), and change the sky culture (Inuits anyone?). Moving around the sky is as easy as clicking and dragging with the mouse. The scroll wheel lets you zoom in and out.

Instead of menus, options are located along the bottom left corner and allow you to outline the constellations, show the Equatorial grid, view nebulas, search for objects, and configure a variety of custom settings.

Despite knowing nearly nothing about the stars, I was able to set Stellarium to my location and add constellation lines to help me recognize the stars that make up the constellations viewable from my location. Thanks to Stellarium, the Big Dipper will never escape me again.

Stellarium is a beautiful, versatile, and scientifically accurate program. If you're a budding astronomer, you need it. If you have the type of friends that would be impressed if you casually pointed out Orion, then you definitely need it. Stellarium is free and you can grab it at the project’s website.

SlimBatteryMonitor: A Simply Better Battery Monitor

Ryan Smith — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:25:00 +0000

First, it was the iMacs with their thinner, revamped aluminum and glass shells. Next, it was the MacBooks, with the anorexic MacBook Air boosting to be the world's thinnest notebook. But long before that, the original Mac weight loss champ was a highly customizable menubar utility, called SlimBatteryMonitor.

SlimBatteryMonitor is a replacement for Apple's menubar battery gauge. It has the ability to save menubar space by showing various states of charge (charged, charging, and running on battery) via customizable colors and optional time or percent text.

The heart of SlimBatteryMonitor is an icon which can be changed to several different shapes, including a rectangle, a thin rectangle, a rounded design, and a horizontal bar. In addition, for a quick look at the status of the battery, the icon color can be customized to show when the battery is fully charged, charging, and draining.

The user can also customize the text across the various states to show time, percent, or nothing at all, to save even more menu space. For example, I have the text off when the battery is fully charged. When my iBook is running on battery, I have it set to show percent remaining, and when my iBook is charging, I have it set to show time remaining until fully charged.

SlimBatteryMonitor is a really great tool to replace Apple's gauge and reclaim some menubar space. Best of all, the free menubar application is a universal binary and you can grab it right here.