As you can imagine, having Drew Barrymore covering my screen could get distracting and, more recently, downright dangerous! Enter Desktoptopia: screens for your screen. This is the application that has saved my relationship, so I felt it necessary to mention it on MacApper.

Now first off, let me say that this application may have been a godsend for me, but I am serious in saying that this is quite a nice little app, especially considering it’s free! First off, one of my favorite features is multiple screens support. I don’t know how many applications out there support this, but it’s certainly been a great way to keep Drew in my life! I can just turn off the screen and my girlfriend is none-the-wiser. (hopes she’s not reading this)

As you can see from the screenshot above, it can configured to start up automatically, rotate your wallpaper at a given interval and provides these images via feeds. There are only a few feeds to select initially, however you can add and remove as you please. Also, there appear to be many desktops already available from it’s default install. The application can sit in your menu bar, and anytime you’re not happy with the current wallpaper, it’s as easy as clicking Next from the menu to move on to the next one. If you come across a wallpaper you like, say something with Drew Barrymore in it, you can even pause the rotation to give her extra screen time! Overall this application fits the bill quite nicely and doesn’t have a huge memory footprint. Finally, it also has a large collection of both standard and wide screen wallpapers available, which has been great for my girlfriend’s old G4 iBook.

Desktoptopia is currently available as v1.5 and is Universal. You can get it free here.

I’m a software developer, so seeking out software to fulfill the task seemed the best way to go about this problem.  Sure enough I found my answer in MacFamilyTree from Synium Software. This software went above and beyond my needs.  The amount of information you can store in addition to the standard family relationships is just amazing.  Combine this with a slick interface and OS X integration and you’ve got yourself the best genealogy application around.

Adding people and information is as simple as starting with the Family Assistant.  You add a person of reference (MacFamilyTree recommends adding yourself), then simply start adding family members from there. You can share your family tree in a variety of ways including .Mac, MacFamilyTree.com or even DVD. MacFamilyTree has is fully GEDCOM-Compatible offering transparent sharing of your family data. Additional features include reporting, charts, and in the new 5.1 release, a very pretty interface. In addition to storing information about a person, media such as images, movies, documents, URLs and music can also be added.  This came in handy when talking about my Aunt Clare, as she was a musician (I was able to store songs with her information).

There are other some other genealogy apps for the Mac including Family and iFamily, however, none had the feature set and ease of use that MacFamilyTree provides. MacFamilyTree may not have cured my uncle’s Alzeimers, but it certainly helps prevent an old man’s heart from breaking!  In my book, it’s great software worth a look. One thing to note, after installing the application for the first time, I attempted to launch the application via Quicksilver only to find it didn’t exist.  I then went into my Applications folder and found the item to be there. It gets indexed by Quicksilver as MacStammBaum, probably something to do with the package contents, but this is a little out of my scope.  Please post comments if you know how to fix this. MacFamilyTree is available from Synium Software for $49.