In today’s MacApper How-To, we’re going to show you a little app to bridge the divide between Facebook and your Apple Address Book.

1) Head on over to the Apple.com downloads section, and grab a handy little app called AddressBookSync.

2) Once you’ve downloaded the disk image, and dragged it to your Applications folder, go ahead and launch the app. Upon launch you’ll be prompted to give it access to your Facebook account via Facebook Connect.

3) Once you connect, the app should start downloading your friends list, and comparing any names within Address Book to your friends list. AddressBookSync will also download your friend’s current profile pictures, and show them side-by-side with the current picture you have assigned to them in Address Book (if any).

4) Hit “Sync to Address Book,” and all of the photos will be assigned in Address Book.

You can feel free to trash the app once finished, but I suggest keeping it around. That way you can keep photos up-to-date for all of your contacts. Facebook’s TOS prevent developers from calling other useful info like e-mails, screennames, and phone numbers through the API (likely out of privacy concerns), but getting the photos is a definite first step. No more digging through photos and cropping!

When it comes to depth of content, lets get one thing straight; the database in Movie Genie isn’t just IMDB-like, it is IMDB.  Less a movie database and more an method of presenting IMDB in an iPhone-friendly way, Movie Genie acts as your go between for IMDB when you’re on the go and it does what it does incredibly well.  The fine folks at IMDB have been dragging their heels on developing an iPhone app for far too long.  Now that Movie Genie is here, they may very well have regretted the wait.

Any actor, director, or film can be found in seconds via the search feature.  Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, the profile is streamlined to make for easy navigation.  At the top of each page are two tabs; one that brings up a person or projects details, and one that brings up the cast & crew or filmography.

The Details page offers up all of the relevant information that you would find in an IMDB profile that’s not pertaining to the list data on the second tab.  Plot, trivia, goofs, user reviews, taglines — you name it, it’s on there.  In fact the only thing that seemed to be missing were trailers, and even they won’t be gone for too long.  The developer currently has trailers slated for a future update.  To keep things streamlined, each of the items on the details page offers up only a few short lines of text.  If you want more, you can just click on the feature to get all of the information.  This makes sure that the Details page provides access to everything you could want without ever getting cluttered.

In addition to the basic search feature Movie Genie also lets you keep track of favorites so that you can revisit material at a later time.  If you’re a big fan of Pauly Shore for example (and who isn’t?) you can bookmark his IMDB profile to your favorites for a quick visit whenever it’s needed.  Even better than the favorites feature (which, lets be honest, was totally expected) is the history tab.  Just give it a quick click and see all of the pages you’ve visited in reverse chronological order (ie most recent first).

Because it uses IMDB as its source material, Movie Genie can help you keep track of more than just movies.  TV shows and video games are also organized here, as well as all of the people associated with them.  If you want to know all the video games Ron Gilbert has worked on or all the TV shows Norman Lear has produced, the information is all at your fingertips.

The only negative to be found with Movie Genie is its nearly total lack of offline functionality.  Because it depends on IMDB for its database resources, Movie Genie needs to remain online for it to work.  And while this should pose no problem for iPhone owners, iPod Touch users will be left out in the cold.  Sure they can browse explore and enjoy when near a wifi point, but let’s be honest — how much of this app’s appeal is for users sitting near a wireless router at home and how much is it for those wanting a point of refernece while in a video store?  Or settling an argument with a friend while out and about on the town?  The idea of Movie Genie is to have a movie database on-the-go.  For iPod Touch users, that simply isn’t the case.

Still, that’s not to say the app would have zero appeal to those who are stuck offline in public.  Let’s say you’ve used your favorites tab to assemble a list of movies you’d like to see.  That list will still be visible regardless of internet connection.  If you want to go any deeper than that though, like finding out who is in the movies on your list or reading a quick synopsis, you’re fresh out of luck.

The lack of offline functionality will definitely be a dealbreaker for a number of iPod Touch users, but when it comes to everybody else?  Movie Genie is easily the best movie reference tool in the iTunes App Store so far.  IMDB should consider dealing directly with developer Taylan Pince when they finally get around to developing an iPhone app, because they’d have a hard time topping what he’s produced with Movie Genie.

Buddy the Bus offers up a 21st century take on the book-and-record sets we used to get as kids.  Back then you’d dig out your Fisher-Price turntable and listen to the narrator read along with the story.  Now that we live in “the future,” both audio and book are magically transported as one package in this totally free app.  Your kids can pop in their headphones and listen along as Buddy the Bus takes his passengers all over the town.

Baby Flash Cards is, to no ones suprise, exactly what it sounds like.  Flash cards are considered by many to be a great way to stimulate a child’s mind.  But why shell out $5-$10 for a set of real cards when you can get a fantastic free set right here?  The free set included in Baby Flash Cards features a variety of real world objects and animals paired up with their matching words.  Cards can be explored alphabetically or randomly, and you can set it so that all the info is on the card at once or the words are hidden until you touch them.

SimpleDraw proves one solid universal truth: kids LOVE coloring.  It’s timeless.  Give a kid in 12th century Mongolia a crayon and he’ll know what to do with it in seconds.  So it should come as no surprise that the one app my 2 year old is always trying to wrestle away my iPod for is the one she calls “COLOR!!”  SimpleDraw’s name couldn’t be more accurate.  You can select from a handful of colors and brush thicknesses, but asides from that things are kept alarmingly minimalist.  Your little one can just put a finger on the screen and go to town.

Children’s Classics let’s you put the tradition of reading with you’re kids right in your pocket.  Sure you could ask your child to sit quietly and patiently on that long train trip/airport wait/doctor’s office visit, but wouldn’t it be more fun to break out the bedtime stories in the middle of the afternoon?  Children’s Classics offers up 16 classics children’s reads ranging from Pinnochio and Robin Hood to Aesop’s Fables and The Secret Garden.  If you find your family is really digging it, make sure to do a search on the AppStore for BeamItDown Software.  Not only have they pblished this great collection, but they have a number of other classic family stories like Alice in Wonderland or A Christmas Carol available completely free of charge.

myHomework is an app that every iPhone/iPod toting student should own, and every parent encourage.  myHomework lets a child keep track of their class schedule, assignments, tests and other school activities.  Even better, it has color coded reminders to let them know when something is about to come due or has missed a deadline.  Organization is a cornerstone to success, and what better developmental task to apply this to than the daily juggle of academia?

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  There are many apps, both paid and free, that prove to be a great resource for parents the world over.  What iPhone apps do you share with your kids?

Project Gutenberg contains over 28,000 free titles that you can access from your computer, and now your iPhone too. Eucalyptus is really just an app that allows you to download and then read books from Project Gutenberg. And it does this very well. You can look at the “Picks” or search by author or book. The Picks are good if you are looking for a very classic book, or just don’t know what you want to read. Once you have selected a book you would like to read, you just click Get Book, and a nice animation shows you that the book has gone to your downloads. The only possible improvement for downloading books would be the ability to browse by genre or alphabetically.

When Eucalyptus downloads a book, there are two parts: The actual downloading and the structure analyzing. The downloading is straightforward, and when it says, “analyzing structure…” it basically means that it is analyzing and converting the book to be read with Eucalyptus. There is even a two-part progress indicator to show you how much of each step has been completed. The longer the book, the longer this whole process takes, so be prepared to wait a few minutes for a long book.

Your library of books is sorted in two ways: By title and by author. The Authors tab allows you to see books by specific authors (and also just see what authors you have books by), and the Books tab allows you to see your books alphabetically. There’s not much more to it than that.

As if its huge library of books, and the ease of downloading weren’t enough, the reading experience is outstanding. There are three ways to go through the book: The slider, flipping pages and the “back” view. The slider allows you to traverse through the book very fast, and also shows you what chapter the new location will be in. Sliding between pages is my favorite. There is only one other app that even does page turning similar to Eucalyptus, and I must say Eucalyptus even puts that app (Classics) to shame with the animations. An app like Classics uses static images to flip from page to page, which creates a great animation. But, Eucalyptus seems to use a real 3D engine. The shadow changes based on where the page is, and the page will even wiggle if you drag back and forth very fast. I really love this part of the app. You can also use the arrows at the bottom to go from chapter to chapter (but not page by page).

Another way to get through the book is the “back” view. You can get to this by clicking the icon in the right of the top bar (when in a book). Here you can simply click on a chapter (or other section), and Eucalyptus will bring you there. It also shows you the current chapter (or section). This basically brings a table of contents to the book, that is accessible without having to flip to the beginning of it.

Eucalyptus costs $9.99 in the App Store, and you can easily see the amount of polish and work put into it. It has become my favorite book reader instantly. And because of its huge library, you’ll always find a book to read. However, it is very expensive compared to other readers, but in some of those, you have to pay for books, or you only get a few. Anyone looking to read classic books on the iPhone must at least check out Eucalyptus. I might even say it is one of the most polished apps in the App Store.

The main window is uncluttered, yet powerful.

Meet SOHO Notes, the anything and everything note-taking app. Put notes into folders and sub-folders, label them, encrypt them, scan them in, record and link audio files as notes, set alarms, define your own forms for quick notes, sync your notes with MobileMe, write them in full screen: the list goes on and on.

Power users are likely going to want to start out by heading up to the Preferences panel, where they’ll be met with appearance tweaks, shortcuts, blog publishing settings, MobileMe and iPod syncing options, backup settings, security, and more. SOHO Notes features a basic text editor with standard rich-text formatting options very similar to TextEdit. Each note’s title is highlighted by a bold navy blue title bar that really helps distinguish between different notes.

One of the pre-built forms is for software serial numbers

The app has an integrated web browser to allow web research to be done from inside the note taking area, and web archives can be saved to pull webpages down to the app. Notes can be viewed full screen, in tabs, and inline with the app.

Naturally everything is searchable inside the application, and SOHO Notes also fully integrates with Spotlight to make locating notes incredibly easy. Smart folders as well as custom folders can be made inside the app to help quickly sort the notes. The app also integrates quite nicely with iPhoto, Address Book, Mail, and iCal.

SOHO Notes functions in both single-user and multi-user environments. SOHO Notes allows remote databases to be accessed over a network, allowing for employees to share meeting notes and other company documents. Users can be assigned read/write privileges to certain folders and access a number of encrypted databases on a server.

The Database Manager helps users create and access shared databases

The amount of features is quite frankly staggering (way too many to list here, though we’ve tried), but the application feels very manageable and intuitive. A single-user license sells for $39.99, with a family pack for $69.99. SOHO Notes can also be purchased inside of the SOHO Organizer suite. Chronos has really done it with SOHO Notes. Its a clean, un-cluttered app, with an extraordinary amount of power. SOHO Notes is only compatible with Leopard.

Books displays titles in a gallery view with a summary box below

Books is a great solution to make your own digital book information database. With Books you can scan your entire collection using your Mac’s built-in iSight camera. Simply hold a book’s barcode in front of the red scan lines in the iSight window, and Books will read the ISBN number. Then you have the option of calling a number of different databases, including Amazon.com, to fill out the rest of your book’s information.

The info fields can be filled automatically by iSight scan or by hand

One downside I found is that while overall accurate, the built-in iSight scanning wasn’t always perfect and took longer than I’d like with some barcodes. I’d recommend scanning books in a well-lit room to give the camera optimal light to read the barcode.

The app has a robust extensions engine with a number of fantastic plug-ins written for it. One plug-in allows users to generate a website with just a few clicks. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that the generated site came equipped with a built-in search feature, and a really slick interface.

Books can generate attractive web libraries with just a few clicks

Books serves as a great personal catalogue, and also has functionality to work as a check-in, check-out system. I could see it being useful for used book stores interested in creating a web catalogue, or professors who wanted to create a catalogue online or library system for checking their books in and out. Then of course there’s always the book enthusiast who wants to keep their own personal catalogue of what they own, or what they’ve read.

While the app could use a little polish here or there, overall Books is a pretty incredible application. With an extensive pool of extensions, users who work with book databases will surely find use for it. Plus Books comes for the best price: free.

How does it work?

Simply put, doubleTwist is constantly updated with drivers and software designed to work with all of the latest gadgets and gear that stores all of your digital media assets.  Because of this, doubleTwist makes it as easy as plugging in your device, and dragging and dropping in your media files to and from your devices.

The Interface

DoubleTwist’s interface makes up a good part of it’s feature list.  DoubleTwist takes after a longtime design principal commonly found in iTunes and iPhoto.  In the right section of the window, you’ll find a sidebar filled with a list of sources where you’ll find your media content.  The sidebar is divided into four sections:  DoubleTwist “aka sharing information with doubleTwists’s own sharing service”, Library “used to access the media on your computer’s hard drive”, Devices “used to access your digital device’s content”, and Friends “which also works with DoubleTwist’s own sharing service”.

The right side of the app is where you view and interact with your content.  This side of the app changes based on what you have selected in the sidebar.  When viewing the “My Feed” section, you get at consecutive list filled with notifications.  Inside of these notifications are thumbnails of pictures, movies, and music which you can view at anytime.

When looking at any of the the Library sections, the right area of the app shows a simple browser interface designed for the one purpose of finding your media, and dragging it onto your device.

Which brings us to the Device section.  Clicking on the device itself shows a progress bar depicting how much storage space you have available.

PSP and Video!

One thing everyone always gripes about is video conversion.  Well gripe no more because doubleTwist automatically converts your video for you no matter what device you are using.  This is a big plus for PSP users.  Just drag in the video, and doubleTwist does the rest.  Thumbnail and all!

Sharing Online

Besides integrating with your digital devices, DoubleTwist also integrates with FaceBook, Flickr, and YouTube allowing you to share your captured media online.

DoubleTwist also has a sharing service built in.  This allows you to easily share your media with all of your friends.  When you receive a photo, video, or audio file, doubleTwist will automatically update your feed.

Final Thoughts

DoubleTwist is still very new, meaning the compatible device list is a little sparse however, because doubleTwist is an ongoing project, the developers are hard at work making more and more devices compatible.

In terms of performance, doubleTwist does not disappoint.  Depending on how much memory you have as well as the speed of your Intel processor, the time it takes to transfer and convert video will vary, however testing on a 2nd gen aluminum iMac I found that doubleTwist is quite fast and will not disappoint.

DoubleTwist is available for the Mac (Leopard only) and PC at http://www.doubletwist.com/ for the unbeatable price of free.

The Schoolhouse interface bears a striking resemblance to iCal

When the app is first launched iCal users will immediately notice a familiar layout. Separated into 3 columns, Schoolhouse works and interacts similarly to iCal, but is designed with your studies in mind. Users can add as many classes as they choose, and fill out useful information about classes. Assignments, tasks, and notes can then be added to each class with options to customize due dates, attach files, add partners, assign priority, and deadlines for tasks. Notebooks to store a group of notes can be created by course, or separately for sub-topics.

Course schedules, instructors, and assignment types can all be customized

Schoolhouse allows you to add as much or as little detail about your schedule and assignments as you choose, depending on how organized you are. Assignments can be added and viewed quickly, or entered with significant details. Students can check off assignments when completed, enter grades for tests, and keep track of their term grades with the built-in Grades feature. The app also allows students to contact their teachers about specific assignments with just one-click.

Rich text notes can be stored in Notebooks and courses

While the app has robust customization features, I still wasn’t able to adapt it to my course schedule. I also felt confined to the app, with no way to export my assignments except for the proprietary Schoolhouse database. I would love to see options to export to iCal, iPods, and the web in the future. Also, I found the lack of keyboard shortcuts annoying as I tried to enter and manipulate my courses and assignments. Plus there’s no integration for students that have online textbooks or web services tied to their courses. I would also like to see the app fit more naturally into OS X by Schoolhouse 3. The app currently has portions that are non-standard for OS X applications, which Mac users wont find as intuitive as most native applications.

Schoolhouse was updated at the beginning of February after being crippled for well over a year. Leopard users on Intel Macs had to force Schoolhouse to run through Rosetta, causing the app to crawl. On February 6th the developer published Schoolhouse 2.2, fixing a number of the Leopard compatibility issues. The app remains overall the same. Classcasting, a feature that published assignments in RSS via .Mac, was removed due to the .Mac / MobileMe switch over and changes to the service. Current users can feel more comfortable upgrading to the new version because their library will be automatically backed-up before upgrading, but they will be frustrated when they can no longer manually backup and restore the database.

Despite some of the short-comings Schoolhouse is an amazing application. Now that the Leopard compatibility issues seem to have been sorted out, I feel comfortable using it to keep track of my assignments again. While there are plenty of features that can be added in the future, there are tons current features to help students keep track of their studies and spend less time doing it.

When it comes to font management on the Mac, almost everyone immediately thinks Font Book.  Apple’s built-in font manager is great for simple font management, but it really doesn’t cut it when it comes to people who really want to organize their fonts in the greatest way possible.  Take a look at Fontcase,  a stunningly designed app designed to truly manage all of your fonts, the way you want to.

Apple introduced a lot of features in Mac OS X Panther.  Some features were more popular than others — take Exposé, for example.  One highly desired app finally made it into the OS’s web of pre-built-in software utilities called Font Book.  Font Book was designed for simple font management that allows you to organize your fonts and access them quickly when needed.  Though this app is effective, it hasn’t seen a major change in two major operating system updates, and still features the same three column design.  Though affective, Fontcase has shown that there is a better way to do this.

Fontcase’s interface is very streamlined and quite stress-free to work with.  Using elements from iLife and the Finder, Fontcase seems to blend in with the rest of your Mac’s applications.  The sidebar on the right-hand side of the app’s main window is used to help you navigate and organize your fonts.  The main section is where your fonts are shown.  Below the main section is an area dedicated to the selected font.  It includes 3 main tabs: Glyphs — which are the actual characters, Waterfall — a view showing the font with a sentence of choice, and Body Text — which shows your font in paragraph form arranged in a couple columns.

Viewing Fonts

Think of fonts that have multiple styles like they are “Events” in iPhoto.  Simply move your mouse across a font with multiple styles to see a preview of them appear inside the font’s icon.  These fonts do not have to be activated on your computer in order for Fontcase to view them.  You can then press the Spacebar to take a “QuickLook” of the font in a preloaded sentence that displays all of the alphabetic characters.  To view each character more closely, click on the Glyphs tab at the bottom.  You can then double click on a character look at it more closely.

Comparing fonts is one of Fontcase’s greatest features.  Select two or more fonts and hit the  button, also known as the compare button.  Fontcase shows you a bunch of columns allowing you to compare each glyph in a cleanly spaced view.  You can use the iPhoto-like slider at the bottom to change the size of each character.

Clicking the Header Text tab above does exactly what you think it does — it shows you what the fonts would look like if they were used as header text.

A really useful feature is the ability to compare the fonts in a body text-like view.  To do this, click the Body Text tab.  You can then change the alignment and filler text to better choose the correct font for your project.

Organizing Fonts

Like any good app for the Mac, Fontcase organizes your fonts into playlist-like collections to better access them.  To create a new collection, press Apple + Shift + N to bring down the “New” sheet.  Enter a name and hit Add.  All you have to do now is drag the fonts into the collection to better organize them.

To create a new Smart Collection, bring down the “New” sheet and choose Smart Collection from the toolbar.

Now you can have Fontcase automatically fill a collection with fonts that conform to the attributes you set to the Smart Collection.

As if that wasn’t enough, tagging is also available in Fontcase.  To tag a font with any particular tag, select a font and hit Command + I to “Get Info”. 

Go down to the “Tags” section and type away.  Fontbook automatically adds an item in the sidebar for each tag for better browsing.

Sharing Fonts

Now that you have your fonts organized, it’s time to share them with everyone at the office.  Fontcase makes this extremely easy by using Apple’s zero-configuration technology called Bonjour.  Go to Fontcase > Preferences… or press Command + , and choose “Sharing” to activate it.  Just like in iTunes, you can now browse other people’s font libraries – except this time you can copy their fonts and download them to your computer.

If you’re worried about how your font will look when using it for print, why not let Fontcase print a preview page for you?  Choose File > Print or press Command + P when you have a font selected to create a nicely designed preview page containing all of the information you need.

Performance

Fontcase really runs like a charm.  I have not run into any bugs when using this app.  The bugginess of a beta has left this now (at the time of writing) version 1.05 of Fontcase.  Though I couldn’t find the specs for the app on their webpage, it looks as if you need Mac OS X Leopard to take full advantage of the app and its font organizing abilities.  Speed “like any app on the Mac” will vary depending on your processor and memory size.  Fontcase does generate the previews you see in each icon automatically, however if you’d like to get it all over and done with, choose File > Generate Previews… and Fontcase will create all of you previews.  As stated in the sheet above, depending on your library “and system specs”, this might take a while.  If your library is massive, choose this option when you’re on break, or before bed.

Pricing and Availability

Fontcase is available at http://www.bohemiancoding.com/?Fontcase for the price of $46 (USD).  You can also get a family pack of 5 licenses for $68 (USD) and a Business pack of 10 licenses for $261 (USD).

Getting Things Done

Let’s start off with a quick overview of David Allen’s system of Getting Things Done.  It all starts with the idea of getting everything out of your head, and onto paper.  This way, you don’t have to worry about holding every little detail in your head, which in turn will give you less stress.  Once you’ve downloaded the information into one easily accessible source, you now can organize your information into projects and assign contexts.  

What are projects and contexts?  Projects are tasks that require multiple steps.  For instance: The task of Painting the garage requires you to get paint, then Organize the garage for painting, then after that - Start painting the first coat.  The project is called “Paint the garage” while the actions (the steps or to-dos associated with this project) are “get paint” and such.

Contexts are the tactile and physical aspects of your projects and actions.  Every project and action should have a context.  Organizing your projects by context is one of Getting Things Done or GTD’s greatest features.  Using the same example, a couple of contexts for this project might be Home or Errands.

Things’s Interface

The developers of Things certainly made a huge effort on making the app’s interface as streamlined and as beautiful as possible.  Using the iTunes-like sidebar along with the iPhoto-like toolbar at the bottom makes Things blend right in with your iLife apps.  The interface is divided into 2 parts.  The first part “on the left” is used for navigation, while the second part “on the right” is where you view and edit all of your actions.

The Sidebar

At the very top of the sidebar you’ll notice it says collect, followed by an item called the Inbox.  The inbox is where you download all of the information from your head and into Things.  Don’t worry about projects or contexts just yet.  You just get it out and into the Inbox.  Clicking the “New” toolbar item or pressing Command + N makes a new action.

Once you’ve done that, double click on an action to see its details.  At the top, next to the check box is where the title of the action is located.  Below that is a section for your contexts “in the form of tags” and under that is where you can add any notes that are associated with this action.  At the bottom of the action is where you can assign a due date as well as a spot where you can tell Things when to move this action into the “Today” section (more on that later).

Below the Inbox in the sidebar is the section entitled “Focus”.  This is where Things really shines.  The “Focus” section is divided into 5 parts:

The first part is called “Today”.  In “Today”,  Things allows you to create your own “agenda” for the day by devoting a special  list for just the items that you want or need to do today.  

Below that is the “Next” part.  Here is where Things lets you review your up-coming projects and actions. (The screenshot above is of the “Next” part.)  Please note that items in either the “Scheduled” or “Someday” lists will not be shown in the “Next” list.

Under that is the “Scheduled” part.  If you ever want Things to remind you about a certain project or action in the future, this is the place to go.  Drag an item into the Scheduled list to assign a day when you want Things to remind you to review a certain project or action. 

Beneath the “Scheduled” list is the “Someday” list.  If you ever have an action or project that you want to do someday, but can’t really decide on a certain time to review or actually do it, put it in the “Someday” list.

Finally, in the Focus section we have the “Projects” list.  Simply put – it displays all of your projects including the non-active ones.  Non-active in this case means a project that has been moved into the “Someday” list or is at least not pressed to be completed.  Below this, Things automatically displays your active projects for easy navigation.

The next section is called “Areas” or Areas of Responsibility.  Think of these as folders for your projects.  Using the example above, one might create an area called “Garage” and put the “Paint the Garage” project inside it.  It’s just another way of organizing your projects and actions.

The bottom of the sidebar is home to two items:

The “Logbook” is where Things puts all of your completed items.  You can tell things to log completed items automatically, or manually do it by hitting the proper toolbar item.

The Trash should be the most recognizable and understandable element of the sidebar.  Think of it as the trash in your dock.  If you delete an item, it will go inside the trash.  When you want to free up space, control click it and choose empty trash.

The Action Toolbar

This toolbar is found in the main content view at the bottom.  The “New” and “Edit” toolbar items should be self explanatory.

The “Today” toolbar item adds the currently selected action or project to your “Today” list.

The “File” toolbar item brings down a sheet that allows you to move the currently selected action(s) into one of your projects, schedule it for later review, add it to the “Someday” list, or add it to one of your “Areas of Responsibility”.  It pretty much allows you to do everything without dragging and dropping an item.

The “Quick Entry” toolbar item brings up the quick entry box (talked about later on).

The “Tags” toolbar item brings up a dashboard that allows you to organize your tags aka “Contexts”.  Here you can nest contexts for instance: Mac > Online > Blog.

The Quick Entry Box

Assigned to a shortcut key value that you can customize in Things’s preferences, you can bring up this box to quickly add an action into your inbox from any application “as long as Things is already open”.  Simply fill it out and hit save.

A Quick Walkthrough Tutorial

Let’s walk through an example of how to use Things starting from when you first download the app to using it in your daily life.

You’ve downloaded Things, and you’re ready to embark on your journey through stress-free productivity!  You are now ready to pour all of your current projects and ideas into Things to fill up your empty inbox.

Choose Inbox at the top of the sidebar and press Command + N to create a new item.  Once you’ve filled out the title, hit tab to move on to adding tags aka contexts.  Already created contexts autocomplete for quicker item creation.  If the default contexts don’t suffice, just enter a new one and hit return.  Feel free to add a due date, however the best thing to do right now, is to get everything out of your head and onto “paper” as it were.

When you’re finished putting everything in the Inbox, think about which actions are related.  If there is more than one step to an action, it’s now time to turn it into a project.  Choose the New Project button in the bottom toolbar.  It’s the second one in from the left that looks like a book in case you get confused with the New Action button to the left of it.  Creating a new project is just like creating a new action.  The only differences is that you can drag, add or create your your actions inside of them.

Now that Things has all of your information organized into projects, it’s time to use Things’s Focus lists to help you get these items done.  

Click on any action or project and choose the Today toolbar item at the bottom.  That item has now been added to your agenda for today.  Another way to have Things automatically do this for you is to schedule an event to be reviewed.  To do this, drag an item onto the Scheduled list in the sidebar.  Choose a date or a length of time and Things will move that event into Today when it is time to do so.

There are always those tasks that you would like to do, but don’t really need to finish them at a certain time or feel like doing them now.  Things has a list for this too called Someday.  Just drag your actions and projects into this list, and you will never be bothered about them unless you decide to view this list.

 What happens every day

Everything is added and organized, so what do you have to do now?  Click on the Next list in the sidebar.  This is where you’ll usually spend most of your time.  Organized by project, Things automatically puts your up-and-coming items in this list for you.  All you have to do is check it, and check off your tasks.

Once you’ve completed a task, click the check box to the left of completed task or project causing Things to gray it out.  When you want to clear out all of your competed items, click the Log Completed toolbar item at the bottom to clean them out and put them in the Log Book located in the bottom left-hand corner of Things’s main window.

Performance and Other Information

Things is required to be run on a system with Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later.  Although speed will vary depending on your processing power and memory storage capacity, Things runs extremely quickly even with a very large and extensive library.  Things has just reached the magic 1.0 mark releasing it from beta just recently at MacWorld `09.  I’ve barely run into any bugs or hitches when using Things, and if there were any, they weren’t huge – a few view refreshing problems, but none that could be fixed by clicking again.

I’ve found Things to be very good at what it does.  There isn’t any extra features or fluff that doesn’t really need to be there.

One might compare Things to an app like OmniFocus.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses.  Both apps are based on the GTD system, but go about them in different ways.  Things is more visual, while OmniFocus is more list-oriented.

Price and Availability 

Things is available at http://culturedcode.com/things/ for the price of $49.95 (USD).  Be sure to check out Things’s product page for more details.

How did you get started programming for Macs and how did Potion Factory come about?

After working as a programmer for a long time, I started Potion Factory almost 4 years ago with a friend because we were feeling adventurous with our lives and because we liked the Mac platform so much. We have since gone our separate ways, but I still enjoy this work very much as I get to be both programmer and graphic designer.

What made you develop The Hit List in light of Omni Group’s OmniFocus and Cultured Code’s Things, other GTD apps?

I made The Hit List because I didn’t find any applications that I wanted to use to keep track of my long list of things to do.

The work on The Hit List began before any of those apps you mention became publicly available. It’s funny how people now think that The Hit List is an amalgamation of all the good ideas in those apps, but from my point of view, they feel like my application split into separate pieces.

I didn’t pay too much attention to those apps anyway because I thought that what I was working on was pretty unique.

How does The Hit List differ from OmniFocus and Things and what makes it special?

The Hit List is for you if you don’t like being forced into a specific workflow. I made it fairly generic but it does support many of the GTD concepts. It’s an application that can be as simple or complex as you want it to be, but at the same time, I have tried to make the user interface simple to the point where it’s almost invisible. It’s also opinionated in some areas. One example would be the single key shortcuts and the helpful hint buttons that encourage their use.

When you learn Kendo, they teach you that you must use your sword as an extension of your arm, meaning, that you must be comfortable enough with your tool to the point where it feels like just another part of your body. Similarly, I wanted the user interface in The Hit list to be seamless and efficient enough so that it feels like an extension of your mind. An example of software that has this amazingly invisible UI are video games. With video games, you don’t think about pressing buttons to get something done, most of the times, you just do it. I wanted more of that kind of interaction in my application.

I really enjoy it when people tell me that The Hit List feels just right because of this.

Are there any special features coming in the iPhone app that are not already in the OmniFocus or Things iPhone apps?

I don’t check out competitors’ applications before my own is done so I can’t really answer this one. The reason for this is that I’m trying to make the best product in my own way and I don’t really care what the other companies are doing. Being in the same space, you still tend to end up with similar features, but at least I’ll know that I arrived at those answers on my own rather than being influenced.

When can we expect to see the iPhone app?

When it’s done.

How do you justify the price of The Hit List (or any app) and will there be a “switcher” discount?

If you’re serious about your productivity, I think you can justify it. This is the type of application that can get you promotions at work and better grades at school. It certainly has made me a more productive person. With that in mind, when you compare the price to that of a concert ticket or a video game, I don’t think that it’s too out there. Also, I’d like to think that the love I have poured into this application is worth something.

I don’t know about a switcher discount yet, but even if I did offer it, I can’t imagine it being anything more than the current $20 discount on the pre-order sales.

How do you combat software piracy?

I don’t really try too hard on that front. I think there are enough decent people in this world—especially in the Mac community—who will contribute to the development of a good product by paying for it. I’d rather spend my limited time helping those people rather than spend it on trying to keep out the people who won’t or can’t pay for it anyway.

How do you personally use The Hit List?

I have separate lists for my products into which I brainstorm ideas and file bugs. These tend to get quite large, so then I go through the long list and set priorities on each item. Then I decide on what to work on each day and file it into the Today list. Using the outline features, I always break things down to actionable items that take no more than 30 minutes to complete. This keeps me focused and productive throughout the day as completing each little task is quite satisfying. Putting things in contexts helps a lot as well. For example, the one I use often is @photoshop.

When it’s time to actually do the work, I’ll switch into card view and focus on just that task. I just charge through those cards without second guessing what I should be doing.

At the end of the day, I review what I did and archive the completed tasks.

Sadly, the short answer to this is no.  While Movie Brain claims to offer an index of more than 800,000 movies, it only seems to index theatrically released feature films (and now according to a recent update, straight-to-DVD content).  As a result it offers a fairly comprehensive list for those not looking to delve too far into a certain actor or director’s work, but not comprehensive enough to ever provide true satisfaction to a cinephile.  Who could ever truly call a list of Pacino films complete without including The Local Stigmatic?  Or a Danny Boyle list without including Vaccuuming Completely Nude in Paradise?  Sure they’re obscure, but when shopping around for a reliable movie database, these are the sort of films you want to make sure are in there.  After all, how can you discover new movies if the obscure isn’t well represented?  Other notable films not listed include Powers Boothe’s career-making performance in Guyana, and the third installment in the Infernal Affairs trilogy.

Despite the noticeable weakness in the database, Movie Brain offers a number of features that any film fan on the go can appreciate.  Once you’ve located a specific film, actor or director whose body of work you’d like to check out, you can bookmark the selection and save it amongst other bookmarks you’ve made to return to later.  Many of the entries also feature a write-up of the individual or film, as well as a poster (if the selection is a movie).  If you’re looking for more details, you can even visit IMDB entries at the click of a button.  Some listings even offer Rotten Tomatoes links as well.  Version 1.0 offered NYTimes reviews, which appear to have been replaced by RT in  this version.  It’s a shame they couldn’t have kept both as it would have offered even more range in further reading material.

Movie Brain also offers a great feature for Netflix users.  You can visit the Netflix page for any movie with a simple click from the “More Info” button and add the film to your queue right from your iPod.  A really nice touch about the Netflix, IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes features is that it doesn’t move you over to the browser to check these pages out.  Most apps will simply hotswap you over to Apple’s own Safari browser when linking elsewhere on the net, but MovieBrain never forces you to leave the program.  A simple click of the “Done” button takes you right back to the page in the index you used as a jumping off point.

With the exception of bookmarking, none of the above features is available in the offline mode which for many users will be the main draw of Movie Brain.  It’s understandable that web-based links elsewhere aren’t useable, but even basic features like movie posters and write-ups cease to exist in the offline mode.  Once offline, you’ll be stuck with nothing more than access to Movie Brain’s somewhat limited database which, if you’re looking to discover new things, will be a somewhat moot tool.  Other features that one might want to see in an online movie database app — “related films,” “you might also like…” or community-based features — are completely non-existent.

With every cloud though, there’s a silver lining.  Having originally released only a month ago, the developers have already released an update that took a number of complaints to heart.  Version 1.0 lacked a director search option and suffered from a bug that caused some scroll attempts to turn into clicks.  Both were rectified in 1.1.  Had they not been this review would have been angling much closer to handing out an “F” due to it’s broken nature.  Their handling of those situations, as well as adding in direct-to-DVD films, shows that Movie Brain is an application with room to grow and a team that’s willing to nurture that growth.  Until that growth happens though, Movie Brain doesn’t offer much more than a somewhat incomplete index of films that can be browsed online or off.

Movie Brain is available in the iTunes App Store for $2.99.

As said above, Deep allows you to search by colors. This can be really useful if you are looking for all the pictures of your room, because you know the wall color. Instead of making you pick a color out of the blue, Deep shows you a list of colors that your images contain. But they aren’t really specific colors, they are ranges. So, if you know the picture has a dark red in it, click on the icon that includes that color. This may sound really powerful already, but it gets even more powerful. Once you have clicked on a range, you can click on another one to narrow it down even more. When you click on another color, the list of colors and the list of images will then narrow down. There will always be 7 rows of colors, though, that go through the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, violet).

Once you have selected an image, Deep gives you even more options. On the right side of the window you will see another color list, this time for colors in that image. Below the preview of the image you will see a view with all of your images. But when you click on one of the colors in the right, this list will narrow down to only images with that color. Deep can show you similar images with just a few clicks. But you can also have Deep do this for you with its “Genius” functionality. In the toolbar you will see an icon that looks like iTunes’ Genius button. If you press it, Deep will find all images similar to the selected one. It will still do it by color, but it should make it even easier to find similar images.

One gem in Deep that many can easily miss is its image list scroller. You can use a left or right scroller on a mouse to scroll through, but there’s another way — a better way — just click anywhere in the list and flick with your mouse, left or right, and the list will move through the images. Unlike regular scrolling, it will not stop moving until it has reached the end of the list. You can also just hit the Play button to have it go through the list slowly. The only issue is, there is no pause button, so you have to stop it by clicking somewhere on the list. Although it also has some issues (like dragging up or down can resize the list), it is still a very cool way to view a list of images — very iPhone-like.

Although Deep’s main purpose is to allow you to search images through colors, it also includes a few other things. First of all, when any image is selected, you can just hit Enter to enter some tags. This will also make it easier to find images in the future. You can also sort by image type, location and size and shape. You can actually do all of these at once. This means that you can look for a raw image in your Pictures folder that is extra-large, with a dark shade of blue.

Ironic Software’s Deep retails for $34 and you can download a free trial from their site. It solves an issue that many of us have multiple times a day. Although it’s basically a one-trick-pony, it does the job, and does it well.

How did you get started programming for Macs and how did Cultured Code come about?

I started programming in 1981 on a Sinclair ZX80, which was a pretty amazing computer. The ZX80 was much smaller than even the Mac mini. Of course, it was not only smaller in physical size, its operating system fit in 4K! The computer landscape at that time was very different from what we have today, but it was extremely exciting and it was also obvious that this was the start of something new and big. I even sold software while still at high school in the form of computer code that people actually had to type in to use!

To me, the introduction of the first Macintosh computer in 1984 marked both the culmination as well as the end of this wild and crazy period of computing. Of course then came the PC which I found dull and uninspiring. I moved on and pursued another interest of mine: Mathematics. I studied Mathematics and subsequently became involved in teaching and doing research. It was only until much later when I realized that Apple had actually survived and was still producing computers in a much different spirit than the rest of the industry. But it was actually the announcement of Mac OS X that made me want to once again start creating software. The Mac was a small niche, but Mac OS X was finally something one could again be passionate about.

While still teaching at University, I began to learn Cocoa and prepared myself for leaving and creating a small software company called Cultured Code. This was the time when creating web pages using CSS began to become a feasible alternative. Oliver Marquetant joined me and we created our CSS debugging tool Xyle scope.

What made you develop Things in light of Omni Group already having OmniFocus, another GTD app?

My desire to create software that helps to get organized is actually an old one and goes back to my days at University. When we founded Cultured Code, we actually wanted to create a personal information manager. We called this the “Sea of Information” project. The CSS tool was supposed to be a side project to test the waters. However, it took a life of its own. From a business perspective, it never worked very well, but I got a lot of insight into creating and marketing software.

It was clear that we had to do something different in order to save, and even better, to grow the company. It was an obvious step to revive the “Sea of Information” project. Luckily I discovered David Allen’s book, which was a revelation to me. He seemed to have answers to questions I couldn’t even clearly formulate .

At the time when Omni announced their product, we had already spent a lot of work on our own project including a series of prototypes. But after Omni’s announcement, it became clear that task management would become a respectable product category on the Mac. I got even more enthusiastic and was able to attract Werner and Christian to start working with me. Werner is an amazing programmer with a strong intuition for every aspect of a software company, while Christian was one of the most talented graphic designers I had seen. It is really the combination of our talents and our desire to create something worthy of the Mac platform that made Things possible.

How does Things differer from OmniFocus and what makes it special?

Right from the beginning we wanted to create a tool that was easy to pick up yet powerful. It is no exaggeration, with Things it is possible to manage thousands of to-dos, but Things is also the application with the most modest learning curve.

There are so many methods of becoming more organized, but most of them require quite an amount of mental energy. With Things we wanted to create a product where users only need to spend the least possible amount of energy to get organized. This way you become more productive with what you actually want to do. We were in fact so focused on this mission that we even deliberately dropped features we now learned we shouldn’t have .

But what is really very interesting is that users who were using other products before are now telling us that they are getting more stuff done using Things. This is a great testimonial to the fact that with task management it is vital to not just to provide features, but to work very carefully on how you implement them. Even little design decisions can go a long way in making users more productive.

How do you justify the price of Things (or any app)?

There are two sides to this question: the developer and the user point of view. Luckily both of them are rather compatible in our case .

From a developer point of view it is important to be able to have a strong development and support team. This means that selling a product at too low a price will eventually kill it. Some people who do not have experience with advanced task management, view task management apps as simple to-do lists. But there is much more involved in helping people to get more things done. In fact, the problem space of successful task management is quite involved. Very small software shops are simply not able to do this right. We have seen this a couple of times in the past, where products slowly died because the developer was no longer able to keep up with the various challenges involved. During the past six month we have spent a large amount of time and energy to make Cultured Code stronger as a company, for example by hiring some very talented and experienced programmers. Our users can look forward to us making a lot of improvements available in 2009.

Users on the other hand will ask themselves, whether a product is worth its price? Now imagine working with an application that really makes you more productive. If such an application saves you a few minutes each day, or helps you getting more things done, how much is that worth? I think the precise answer to this question really depends on your work. But with Things we are in the lucky position where its price is much lower than the value it represents to a user.

How do you combat software piracy?

Seriously fighting software piracy requires quite an amount of resources. We rather spend those resources at making Things better. But when they see a useful product at a fair price, the vast majority of users simply want to do the right thing and help continue an application’s development and support.

How do you personally use Things?

Things is always open on my Mac. I manage everything I need to do with it, no matter whether it is related to work or not.

What’s next from Cultured Code?

As I said, task management constitues a large problem space. Expect us to stay ambitious. But also expect the unexpected as we are going to do things differently .

The user interface of The Hit List reflects that of yellow ruled notebook paper with various tabs allowing you to access different to-do lists. It also features a navigational bar on the left hand side of the window very much like other GTD (Getting Things Done) apps. This bar allows you to set up some data structure through various folders, smart folders, and lists. Unlike typical GTD apps, The Hit List’s method of doing things is much different.

Most GTD applications force you do get into the program and with a series of clicks enter your tasks. The Hit List does this in a different and much easier fashion. Instead of forcing the user to spend extra time clicking around adding tags, priorities and et cetra, it allows you to do all the same without your fingers leaving the keyboard. All you need to do is hit ‘return’ when within a list to add a task, once the task is entered you can insert a tag by placing a ‘/’ in front of the tag name or a context by replacing the slash with ‘@’. Personally, I have found this method of adding tasks much easier, allowing me to spend more time on the tasks at hand, although if you are a GUI person this could be a problem.

Aside from The Hit List’s keyboard centric nature, it also allows you to time how long it takes you to complete a task and then log the time as part of the tasks data. Additionally, whenever you complete a task The Hit List plays a noise, which as corny as it may sound, is surprisingly satisfying.

The only thing that worries me about this application is its lack of an iPhone companion application. In the preferences pane of the application, however, they state, “Please rest assured that we’re already working on the iPhone version of The Hit List that will sync with the desktop version”.

The Hit List is currently in beta but is available for pre-order at a discounted rate of $49.95 via the purchase menu in The Hit List. Once the application leaves beta, the price will jump to $69.95. Stay tuned for an interview with the developer. If you have any questions to ask, please post them in the comments.

Mémoires is really just a journal, nothing more. If you are looking for something that also includes tags, blogging abilities, and even more features, you may want to look at MacJournal or Journler. But, those two are also $15 more, so you might not want to look into them if you just want journaling.

Mémoires provides a clean and simple interface, similar to iCal. There is a calendar in the upper left-hand corner, where you choose a date to see all entries for. However, if you click on a date that is not the current date, and add an entry, it will be added to that date. I guess if you wrote an entry on a piece of paper and forgot about it for a week, this could help you. But it can also make things very confusing. Mémoires only provides two fields for each entry: a title and the entry. This makes it simple, so you can focus more on the journal, and less on adding tags and other things. In the entry field you can add special formatting and even images, which provides flexibility for what kind of entry you want to do.

Like many other journaling applications, Mémoires provides an easy way to encrypt your journal. You just go to File > Encrypt… and then choose a password. The whole journal will then be encrypted, so if you forget your password, your journal is gone. Unlike some other journaling applications, Mémoires allows you to choose where the journal will be saved. So if you want to have it on your MobileMe, you can. But Mémoires doesn’t provide regular MobileMe syncing, so to sync between two Macs, you must have it saved to your MobileMe.

If you are switching from one of the journaling programs mentioned above, Mémoires makes it really easy to import your data. You just go to File > Import…, choose the application, and Mémoires will create a new journal with the data in it. Mémoires also allows you to export to RTFD, RTF and TXT formats. Although you cannot import and export to as many formats as in some other journaling applications, you are not completely locked in to the Mémoires format. And actually, you don’t even need to export your journal to view it in another application. If you open the .memoire file in any SQLite application, you can view your data right there.

Mémoires retails for $19.95 and you can download a free trial from the site. It provides you with a clean and simple interface for writing a journal, but does not lock you into one format. Although it does not have as many features as others, that also means that you can focus more on content and less on extras. If you are thinking of starting a journal this year, then you will definitely want to check out Mémoires.

Together can be used as a replacement of the Finder or it can be used along with the Finder. Together does not create a database; it really is just a hierarchy of folders, which is why you can use the Finder to view them too. It actually watches its library folder (~/Documents/Together/Default), so if you drop a file in one of the folders in there (e.g. Images, Documents), it will automatically be added to your library. The other easy way to add a file to your library is the sidebar. If you drag a file onto its Shelf, you can add it to any of your groups, or just your library. In this same Shelf, you can also create Quick Notes and Favorite Files. The final way to add files to your library is to click the Add toolbar item in the main window of the application. Here, you can also create things like Bookmarks, Web Archives, and notes from the clipboard. When you first use Together, it will copy the files you import, but you can change this. In the General pane of Together > Preferences, you can choose to either Copy files, Link to files (keep the files where they are), or Move files (moves the files to Together’s library folder).

One feature that has just been added to Together is automatic tagging. Most other apps like Together have tagging, but Together goes a bit further. When this feature is enabled (the Tags pane of Together > Preferences), Together will automatically apply tags to newly imported files based on similar files. This means that if you have two files with names containing ‘MacApper 08,’ similar tags will be applied. Also, if two files’ contents are similar (e.g. have the same header), similar tags will be applied. Since this feature was first implemented, there have been a fair number of bugs, but most of these have been fixed through updates.

Together also has a nice feature for us widescreen users. It has two view modes: Regular and Wide. To switch, just click on one of the toolbar icons in the bottom toolbar next to the [i] button. Wide mode really just puts the file list to the left side of the preview box, but the results are great; it really makes use of widescreen monitors. Users of WideMail will already be familiar with this view. Together also implements tabs, which can be very useful for viewing many files at once. The tabs could be much better, though. When you open a file in a new tab, it does just that — there is no more file list. So to open a new file in a tab, you have to go back to the Library tab. It is nice to have the extra space (from no file list) in tabs, though.

Together does have MobileMe syncing, but it is very buggy. Even since I enabled it, Together will have a memory leak, give me an error, or crash about once a day. At first I thought it was just me, but then I found that others have this problem too. I give them credit for having it — it’s a nice idea — but it really just needs better implementation. It is also hard to enable. Instead of there being a preference or button for it, you have to go to Together > Library Manager and then enable syncing. This may not sound too hard, but try figuring it out on your own.

Together, by Reinvented Software, retails for $39 and you can download a free trial from their site. It is a good tool for advanced file managing, but if you just want a place to put files until you can organize them, it’s not that good. For that, I would go with ShoveBox. And, like any app of its type, it takes some time to get used to. But if an advanced file manager is what you’re looking for, then Together is a pretty good choice.

iNeedStuff comes pre-loaded with a few hundred common grocery items. The user interface is a good example of iPhone app design — simple and built with standard iPhone UI elements. To add an item to your list you can start typing its name in the search box and the list narrows down quickly as you type. When you find the item you want, tap the + button for the quantity you want. If the item isn’t found you can add it from the search box.

When you go shopping, iNeedStuff uses your iPhone’s location to know where you are. For a place you’ve been to before, it identifies the location instantly. One problem with this is if you’re inside a store it can’t get a GPS location, so it could recognize the store you’re in or another nearby store. If you haven’t shopped at that location before, you will be asked to add the store or manually choose a location. From then on, whenever you shop at that store, iNeedStuff will divide your list into things you’ve bought there before and things you haven’t. As you check things off your list, the app tracks the order in which you get things at that store, so it can put them in that order for future shopping trips. The more you shop at a store, the better it learns what you buy there and what order you shop in. The down side to this is, until you have it trained for most of the things you buy, you have to scroll up and down your list a lot, shopping from both sections. There is also no way to pick a specific store where you want to buy an item.

iNeedStuff also lets you sync your list with their online site, so you can share a list with other iPhone owners. While this functionality is nice for a family that splits up the shopping duties, the online list manager leaves a lot to be desired. The interface is not nearly as attractive or usable as the iPhone UI is. After making changes to your online list you must hit the syncronize button, or the changes will not show up on your iPhone. This seems like an unnecessary extra step. The online list has also been known to hang while synchronizing after renaming an item. The changes have been saved, but the page sits there as if they haven’t. Also, location and order data are not synced, so when your family shops at a store, your iPhone does not “learn” from that shopping trip.

The app itself, however, contains lots of small UI details that make it easy to use. On the shopping list, for example, it only shows a quantity if it is greater than one.  Another nice feature is the ability to turn off screen rotation. As you walk around a store, you tend to hold the iPhone in front of you until you find what you’re looking for. Then you’ll drop that hand to your side, while the other hand picks up the item. This can cause the screen to rotate, so when you pull the list back up to look at it, it could be in landscape, or in the middle of switching back to portrait. Allowing you to turn off rotation shows attention to how people use the iPhone.

iNeedStuff is in active development, and you can even vote on new features from within the app itself. Despite the disappointing online list manager, the app itself is a very capable shopping list. iNeedStuff is currently $8.99 and available in the App Store.

MacApper: DrawIt is now one of the most popular vector apps for the Mac, so what drove you to create it?

Pieter: DrawIt started I think about four years ago, really as a project to get some basic experience with programming.

I had just switched from Windows to the Mac I noticed there was not a simple drawing application available for the Mac, and since I needed something like that, I decided to create it myself.

Looking back it wouldn’t have been the lack of drawing applications but rather my inability to use Google, but anyway, that’s what got me started with it.

MacApper: How long have you been programming and why did you start?

Pieter: Early in high school I had my first experience with programming and then a teacher gave a copy of Visual Basic for Windows, and I used that to learn the basic stuff. After that I forgot all about programming for the next few years until I bought my first Mac (one of the last iBook G3).

After that I met a friend (Jelle de Laender, now on CodingMammoth) and we both started to do some programming again, this time in RealBasic. We had a little “company” together and we released a number of very basic applications, one of which was DrawIt in fact.

A lot of those applications went away again, but DrawIt (together with an app called QuickScale) stayed and we would work on those. Almost two years ago we split up and divided our applications; I got DrawIt and he got QuickScale and a few other applications. Since then development of DrawIt went much faster. That’s where we are today.

MacApper: What drove you to start Fontcase?

Pieter: Quite soon after shipping DrawIt again under my own name, I got in contact with Laurent Baumann who initially just had a few feature requests but who ended up also doing an incredible amount of work on of graphics, UI design, and testing for the application.

He knew I was looking for ideas for other Mac apps, and he talked with me about an idea he had for a long time to create a better font manager. And since I liked the idea very much we decided to do this together.
Development started I think early in the summer and we’re finally approaching version 1.0 now.

MacApper: What hardware do you currently use?

Pieter: My main working machine is a 24″ iMac but I also have a Macbook Air which I use when I’m on the road, but it’s also essential for testing the Shared Library-feature of Fontcase, which was the primary reason for buying it.

MacApper: Can we expect any other apps (iPhone or Mac) from you soon?

Pieter: Apart from Fontcase, I have been working a bit on a spin-off project of DrawIt, which currently goes by the name of DrawIt Batch. It’s an app for applying filters like shadow, stroke, scaling, and several CoreImage-filters on multiple images at once.

The app is not yet in beta, mainly because I’m now focusing 100% on Fontcase, and because there’s not yet an icon nor a website.

From the start, I’ve been very interested in doing iPhone development, but it has been a problem of coming up with a really good idea, and besides that, my current desktop projects ask a lot of time.

MacApper: Is there anything else you would like to tell us about? Upcoming features in DrawIt that you are excited about?

Pieter: When Fontcase is out I plan to work again on DrawIt and the main focus there will be on vector export. I’ve received a lot of feedback from people asking for SVG or PDF export and that’s what I hope to provide in the future. I’m also thinking about multiple-page support, but the most important thing will be true vector export.

Of course this presents some problems because almost none of the CoreImage effects make sense in Vector export, so it’ll be quite a challenge.

Thank you very much for giving me an opportunity to talk about my projects. This actually is my first interview, so thanks for giving me some time to talk about this.

MacApper: No problem. Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions.

As mentioned above, Pieter has a new app coming out soon, called FontCase. If you join the mailing list at their Website, you can download the beta today. In case you don’t want to join the mailing list, here is an exclusive preview that Pieter has given us:

Pieter: With Fontcase, Laurent and I have really tried to come up with a user-interface that is perfectly logical for a first-time user, flexible enough for a power-user, and of course packs all the features one would expect from any decent font manager. The UI has changed a lot since we first started. This means that any screenshots I provide at this point might be outdated by the time the application ships.

The website still provides a fairly adequate preview of the application, with the main features highlighted. One I personally quite like is the Compare tool. As the name suggests, it’s designed to be of help when you want to compare a few fonts; you can compare individual glyphs, header text, or paragraph text.

The screenshot below shows the Header Text:

Fontcase tries to be strong on metadata and we made it very easy to edit this. For each variation you can apply Tags, Genres, Foundries, and Designers which will also show up in the sidebar as can be seen in the first screenshot.

The website already shows the icon view, but the third tab, the preview list, is also a very nice one:

We’re very close to finishing the application and we’re very excited about it. There are of course many other features we haven’t mentioned so we hope you’ll all try the application once it’s released. And thanks to MacApper for giving us the opportunity to talk about Fontcase.

Tree gives you two ways to view your outlines: Listview and Treeview. Listview is your normal, everyday, outline view that uses indentation for children. Treeview, however, displays children on the right side of the parent. When in Treeview, you will see a little arrow at the right end of a box (if the box has a child). When you click this box, the child expands to the right. You can also do a bit of a hybrid between Listview and Treeview. If you click the big triangle on the left side of a box, Tree will show that box’s child below it, like in a regular list. But, this will not effect the child’s child or the parent, so you can still display some expanded to the right. If you want to resize a box Treeview, just click and drag on the divider at the top of the outline that corresponds with the box you are resizing. You cannot resize individual boxes, only a certain hierarchical level. So, Treeview, does not replace a mind manager, it is just another view for an outline.

The rest of Tree works exactly as you would expect it to. The toolbar buttons allow you to add, remove, indent, and outdent boxes. The Show Family toolbar icon will expand a whole family (parents and children) based on which way the family was expanded last (right or bottom). Although there is a show family toolbar item, nowhere is there a hide family toolbar item, or even menu item.
The Label toolbar item allows you to label a box a specific color. If you click on a box and then click the Edit Note toolbar item, you can edit the box’s note. The note text will be displayed in grey right under the main text for the box.

Tree also supports importing and exporting to a few formats. To open a OPML file, either go to File > Open or just drag it onto Tree’s icon. To import from a plain text document, just go to File > Open, or drag it onto Tree’s icon. You will then see a dialogue which allows you to view the text file, and choose an encoding to import with. What is strange is that even when you export with Tree, it cannot import notes as notes; they are just children. To export a document, just go to File > Export, and choose a format and encoding. Although Tree does allow you to import and export, you only have the choice of two formats (three including its own), and you can’t even get notes imported from files exported with Tree.

Tree, by Top of Tree retails for about $42.79 and you can download a free trial from their site. It has very few features, but does include a new view for outlining. However, for the price, I suggest you look elsewhere at products like OmniOutliner or OmniOutliner Pro.

VirusBarrier includes a Real-Time Scanner and an On-Demand Scanner. By default, the Real-Time Scanner will be enabled, but if you want to turn it off, go to the Scanner pane of VirusBarrier > Preferences and click the Disable Real-Time Scanner… button. As expected, this scanner will scan every file created on your Mac (which includes downloaded files). When it finds a virus, there are three things you can have it do: Display an Alert, Repair it, or Put it into the Quarantine Zone. The first two are self-explanatory, but the third needs some explaining. When a file is added to the Quarantine Zone, it cannot be opened or read, but it doesn’t repair the file either. If you want to repair it, you just have to access your Quarantine Zone by going to View > Quarantine or clicking on the Malware Quarantine button in the main window. You can then Delete the file, Consider it Safe, Scan, or Repair the file. You may think that scanning the file again is dumb, because it has already done that — but since the file was automatically added to the quarantine, you never got to see what kind of virus it was. So, you may just want to see what it is infected with. A file will also be added to the Quarantine Zone if you do not respond to a Virus Alert Window. To choose what happens when VirusBarrier finds an infected file, just go to the Scanner pane of VirusBarrier > Preferences.

As said above, VirusBarrier also has an On-Demand Scanner. To use this, you need only open the application and click the Scan button. If a virus is found, VirusBarrier does what you have it set up to do in the Scanner pane of the preferences (as talked about above). VirusBarrier also gives you a very nice looking dashboard-like view, showing you how much your CPU is working, percent complete, etc. If you want VirusBarrier to give you a more accurate percent completed, you will want to have the Count Files Before Scan checkbox checked, in the Scanner pane of VirusBarrier > Preferences. By doing this, VirusBarrier will count your files (which takes a little bit of time) before it looks for viruses. In this same pane, you can also choose to scan archives. Archives are files like Zips, Tars, etc. What VirusBarrier will do (if you have the Scan archives checkbox checked) is look through all of the files like these, and make sure there are no viruses in them. VirusBarrier really scans all of your files — even those in compressed archives!

One feature that really brings VirusBarrier so far ahead of the pack is its support for iPhone and iPod Touch scanning. iPhones can be vulnerable to viruses — not usually, but it is possible. So, what VirusBarrier will do (if you have the Scan iPhone/iPod Touch checkbox selected in the Scanner pane of VirusBarrier > Preferences) is copy the entire contents of your iPhone or iPod Touch to your hard drive, scan them, and tell you if there are any files that need repairing. This feature is a little bit of a stretch for those of us not Jailbreaking our iPhones, but for those who do, it will help you feel secure. To just scan an iPhone or iPod Touch, go to View > Scan Selection (or command-1), click Hard Drives, and select your iPod Touch or iPhone.

This brings me to another nice feature in VirusBarrier: the ability to scan only certain types of files. If there’s a certain type (or types) of file that you download from sites that may be less than trustworthy, you may want to just scan that type of file. VirusBarrier makes it easy to do this. Just go to the View > Scan Selection, select Documents, and then select all the types of files you wish to scan. You can also do this for Applications and certain locations by clicking on either Applications or Browse in the Scan Selection view. If you go to the Browse item, there is actually a little gem — you can browse your iPhone or iPod Touch. Although you could easily find a way to scan certain file types in other virus apps, it is nice to have it built in (with a little gem too).

Intego’s VirusBarrier retails for $69.95, and you can download a demo from their site. One thing to note about the demo is that it includes old virus definitions and won’t let you update to the newest. If you want us to buy your software, Intego, you should at least let us see accurate definitions before we buy. VirusBarrier is pretty expensive compared to McAfee or Symantic (or ClamXAV), but it is the only one with a Mac-like interface and ease of use.

Disclaimer: Our sponsor, MacUpdate, is currently offering a Promo Holiday Bundle that includes VirusBarrier 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.

RipIt is a paid app, unlike most of its competitors. HandBrake does an amazing job converting any type of video to many formats, and MacTheRipper does a fairly good job of ripping DVDs. Both of these apps give you so many features that it can be daunting for some people. What RipIt provides is a good-looking and easy-to-use interface, at the cost of a lot of advanced features and ripping to multiple formats. So, before you even decide to try RipIt, ask yourself if you are willing to give up these features. If you’re not, then HandBrake and MacTheRipper are perfectly fine DVD rippers — especially HandBrake.

The point of RipIt is to be simple and to work well, and it does both of these beautifully. If you have a DVD inserted into your computer, when you open RipIt, there will be two buttons on the window: Rip and Eject. Press Rip if you want to rip the DVD, and Eject if you want to eject the DVD. If you click on Rip, then you just have to sit back and relax until RipIt is done ripping your DVD. It even tells you the percent that has been ripped and the time remaining! Once it’s done, there will be a .dvdmedia file in your Movies folder. A .dvdmedia file is a DVD Player (the Mac’s DVD player app) file. If you double-click it, it will open in DVD Player. You now have a file that requires no disk to be present, thus saving you much battery and clutter. RipIt works as simply as that!

RipIt also has a number of preferences that make it even easier to rip DVDs. In Preferences > General, you can choose where to rip to, what to do when the rip is complete, and you can even tell RipIt to start ripping as soon as a disk is inserted! In Preferences > Appearance, you can enable or disable animation (of the disk on the screen), and choose what badges to display in the Dock (like Percent Complete and Time Remaining). And finally, there is the Network pane. This allows you to use something called DiskIndent. This is a database of ripped DVDs (so other users can know if a certain DVD can be ripped). Don’t worry! It sends your data anonymously! If you use it, you will be helping others rip DVDs too.

Although it is possible to rip commercial DVDs, and DVDs not owned by you, we at MacApper do not condone circumventing copy-protection of DVDs using RipIt. So please, only use it on disks that you personally own. RipIt retails for $18.99, and you can download a free trial from their site too. It is by far the best ripping program that I have used to date, so if you rip DVDs, want to conserve battery, simplify entertainment on the go, or organize your movie collection, you should definitely try it out.

Webbla is a new form of bookmark manager. Instead of simply showing you your bookmarks as URLs and names, it also shows you an image of the web page that you have bookmarked. Although this one thing doesn’t really add much functionality to bookmarks, it goes along with the whole idea of Leopard-style apps. You can change the size of the previews by dragging the slider in the lower-right-hand corner of the window. You can also view your bookmarks in a list view, though, by just clicking the List View toolbar button.

Although this is a nice feature, it’s not all that Webbla does; it also adds Notes and Tags to your bookmarks. To add these, first make sure that the Bookmark Detail Pane is visible (View > Show Bookmark Details). Then just click in either the Notes or Tags field to add notes or tags. In this same pane, you can also change the URL and name of a bookmark.

You will also notice that there is a Status field in this Info Pane. This tells you if you have visited the bookmark, the last time Webbla check the status of the bookmark, if there have been any changes to the web page, the load time, the update mode, and something called sensitivity. The first two are self-explanatory, but the last four require some explaining. The Changes field actually tells you if there have been any changes to the page since you bookmarked it. I have never seen that feature before; it’s great! The load time just tells you how long it took for Webbla to load the page. The Update Mode is where you specify how often you want this bookmark to update (check for changes). If you select Manually, you’ll have to right-click on the bookmark and hit Check Website on Changes. Once per Session and Continuously just check once on every use of Webbla or always, respectively. Sensitivity controls what is considered an update. The higher the sensitivity, the smaller something needs to be to be considered an update.

One great little feature that they added to Webbla is the ability to view your bookmarks in Cover Flow — in the Finder. All you do is, in the Finder, create a new search with no search term, but a kind. As a kind, go to Other in the popup, and then type in Safari Bookmark. All your Webbla bookmarks will now appear. However, sometimes you will see cached pages from Camino and Safari, too. If you want to save this, just hit the Save button in the Finder and choose where to save to. Although Webbla does not directly give you a way to view your bookmarks in Cover Flow, it tells you how.

Although I love Webbla’s interface as a whole, there are a few gripes I have with it. First, the New Collection toolbar button’s + is way too small. Second, the Preview toolbar icon looks very fuzzy. I have also been having performance issues; it can take a very long time to process bookmarks sometimes. But, as long as you don’t need access to them right away, this is okay.

Celmaro’s Webbla retails for $21.98, but you can download a free trial from their site. Webbla is a great tool for bookmarking, but it does have a ways to go. I think if you want a visual bookmarking tool, it is the way to go, but if you just want simple bookmarks, Safari is just fine for that.

Evernote is a multi-platform note application sent to us from the productivity gods. The benefit of Evernote is that one can access and upload notes from a Mac, a PC, a  Windows Mobile or iPhone, and anything with a web browser. Evernote can even recognize handwritten or printe text from photos and scanned notes, making them searchable. This functionality will aid me significantly in my two week quest to bring my document clutter to more machines.

It should be “noted” that at present, Evernote only handles the following imported file types: GIF, JPG, PNG, WAV, MP3, PDF. This doesn’t allow Evernote to handle all documents, but there is hope. Evernote Support’s public notebook suggests more file type support for arbitrary file attachments for Premium accounts by the end of this year. Thus, I will be adding a premium account to my Christmas wishlist for this year.

My web browser piles the majority of files into my document drop box. Step one is to channel the majority of this pile into Evernote.

For starters, add the Evernote webclipper to your browser bookmark bar or install the firefox extension and use it frequently.

Next, if you use Firefox, open up your preferences window and click on the Applications tab. Search for supported file types and select the “Use Evernote” option.

Finally, instead of using the nifty Save to PDF option in your print window, why not use the Save PDF to Evernote option and save a step?

These three tips are just the beginning of using Evernote to your synchronization advantage. I’d love to read some comments on unleashing the potential of this note storage monster.

Evernote provides a free maximum montly upload of 40mb with no storage limit as well as free clients for desktop, web browser, and smartphones.  You can upgrade to a 500mb maximum monthly upload for either $5 per month or $45 for the year.

The purpose of CleanApp, or any other app deleter is to completely remove an application from your hard drive. Obviously, they are not completely perfect, but they can come extremely close. One feature that CleanApp incorporates to try to get as many of the app’s files deleted is it’s Logging-Service. To turn it on, go to the Service pane of CleanApp>Preferences and click the Start Logging button. And if you Mac crashes, or you get errors about CleanApp, you may want to reset the database by clicking on the Delete Database button in the Database pane of CleanApp>Preferences. This logging service is a constantly running process that tracks what files each and every one of your applications creates; this helps it to completely remove your applications from your hard drive… and more sometimes. If you save a file with a text editor, the logging service will count this as a file created by the application. So, if you have this service on, you have to pay close attention to what files CleanApp says its going to delete; if you don’t, you might just lose that huge paper that’s due tomorrow. If you ever want to view what files any of your applications have created, just go to the Logging sidebar item. You can then click the triangle next to an application’s name to see these files. You can also delete an application (and its files from here) by just clicking the Prepare to Delete… button when you have an application (or an application’s file) selected.

Another feature that CleanApp implements that I have never seen in an app deleter is deletion of Language Packages. Language Packages are what developers use to make his/her application appear in the main language of the user’s computer. But, there is almost no reason you need to keep Language Packages for any other language than your default. So, what CleanApp does is allows you to choose what Language Packages from an application to delete. All you have to do is drag an application on to CleanApp like you want to delete it, but then go to the Language Packages sidebar item. You will then see every Language Package included in the application except for your default language. You will also see that only some of them are checked. The unchecked ones are the ones that you have told CleanApp never to delete. If it is your first time using CleanApp, then it probably wasn’t you who told it. So, if you want to change what Language Packages never to delete, just specify in the Languages pane of CleanApp>Preferences. The unchecked ones are the ones you will not allow it to delete. Of course, there are free applications like Monolingual that do this same thing, but it is still nice to have it included as an all-in-one.

Another nice feature in CleanApp is its ability to archive your applications. If you want to delete an application for now, but you think you may want to use it again later, you may want to use this feature. First, you may want to specify where the archives go. To do this, click the Change Archive Path… button in the Archives pane of CleanApp>Preferences. Then, when you drag an application on to CleanApp, instead of choosing the Delete item in the popup button at the bottom of the screen, either choose the Archive or Archive & Delete item. CleanApp will then show you what it is doing (e.g. Copying Files). When this process is done, you will notice that the Archives sidebar item has a 1 (or some other value depending on how may you had before) next to it. If you click on the Archives sidebar item, and select the click the checkbox next to the archive you just created, you can click Open Selected Archive… This will open the archive, and then all you have to do is click the Restore Check File(s) button that appeared and CleanApp will restore all of that app’s files from the archive. And, if you decide you don’t like CleanApp, you can open these files manually as disk images in the place you specified earlier. Archives are a great way to make sure you don’t delete an app and then regret it later on.

CleanApp also contains a few more notable features which I will quickly describe. The first one is its Old Files feature. To access it, just go to the Old Files sidebar item. This allows you to see large files that have not been used for a long time. If you want to change the directory where CleanApp searches for these, just click the Add Path… (or Remove Path) button in the Old Files tab of the Paths pane of CleanApp>Preferences. It should be noted, this is a feature that you can find in some free apps. The second one is its Cache Files support. To use this, go to the Cache Files sidebar item. This feature allows you to see the caches that your applications have created. Caches basically make your applications run and load faster… but you should still clear them every once-in-a-while. If you want CleanApp to clear all of your applications’ caches, just click the little checkbox at the top of the window. And to clear individual apps’ caches, check the checkboxes by their names. Again, this is a feature that can be found in some free apps.

Synium’s CleanApp retails for $13 and you can download a free trial from their site. Although all it does is implement a lot of features you may find in free apps, the fact that it is all-in-one gives it some major brownie points. I have also noticed, that even without the Logging Service enabled, it finds files that AppZapper and others don’t find. I think for the price, it is a great option with many nicely implemented features.

Wallet fits its name because it is your digital wallet. You have different groups (like sections in a wallet) where you can store serial numbers, web passwords, credit cards or anything else you want. To create a new set of items (like a database), just hit the [+] button at the bottom-left-hand corner of the main window. You will be prompted with a window where you can customize all aspects of the group. To change the icon of the group, just click on the default folder icon in the upper-left-hand corner and wither choose a pre-made icon or choose a custom icon (by clicking Choose Custom…). The fields are for the basic information you want for the group. If you are keeping track of expenses, you can have fields like Date, Amount and Tax. You can also have multiple sections of fields. To create a new section, click on the Add Field button under the New Section box. If you want to add an AutoFill in Safari for members of the group, just click the Enable AutoFill checkbox, and drag the Website URL, Username and Password icons to their subsequent fields that you created. I must say, I really like the look of this panel because it uses an iPhone like interface. The fields look like table view cells on the iPhone; even the [-] buttons and draggers look alike!

In each item of each group you can enter as many or as few of the fields for that group. You can even add special fields just for that item. To do this, just click the Add Field button under the fields in the item. The titles of there groups will be in bold blue so you can tell that they are special fields. You can also add notes to any item (no need to specify another field) just by editing the Notes section of the item. Along with notes there is also an icon field included by default. Here you can specify an icon for a specific item. And what’s better, when you type in the name of an application you have installed into the name field, Wallet will put its icon in this field! To edit an item just click the pencil icon at the bottom of the window. In editing mode, you can flag (or star) an item just by clicking on the big star next to the name field. Starred items will not appear in the list where they should (alphabetically) but they will always appear at the top. You need not be in edit mode to edit the notes of an item though. When not in editing mode, if you click on a field, Wallet will copy the contents to your clipboard and show any awesome animation! Wallet 3.0 makes is easier than ever to create information and access it!

The best new feature in version 3.0 would have to be MobileMe syncing. When you first launch Wallet, during the setup, you will be asked if you want to enable MobileMe syncing. All you have to do is enter your MobileMe username and password, and you are set. To change when to sync automatically, just go to the Sync pane of Wallet>Preferences… and edit the checkboxes in the Always Sync Before section. You can also always manually sync to MobileMe just by clicking on the Cloud toolbar button in the main window of Wallet. To disable MobileMe syncing, just uncheck the Enable MobileMe Sync checkbox. Not only does syncing allow you to have the same items on all of your Macs, it allows for the iPhone Wallet application to be up-to-date too.

Another new feature added in version 3.0 is the AutoFill menubar item. Wallet has added a menubar item (that is always running, even when Wallet is not) that allows you to fill stored forms for Websites. To enable this, just go to the AutoFill pane of Wallet>Preferences… and check the Enable menubar app checkbox. You will now see a nice little icon (that looks like a wallet) sitting in your menubar. When you want to fill a form, just click this item and enter your Master Password in the field shown. If Wallet finds a stored form it will AutoFill it, and if not, it will tell you so. Instead of having to open Wallet and find the form and AutoFill if from there, you can do it in just one click! Wallet is now just as easy to use as 1Password.

Wallet, by Acrylic Apps retails for only $20 and you can upgrade from version 2 for just $5 and get a free trial! They also have an iPhone app that is only $3.99! Version 3 is a great upgrade to an already great app! If you like organizing any information with ease, then you have to try out Wallet today!

Mail Act-On works the same way as MailTags, once you install it, there will be a new preference pane in Mail.app. In the General tab of this pane, you can specify if the window is locked (it won’t disappear), and fading of the Result window. The “menus” tab lets you choose keyboard shortcuts for Mail Act-On’s basic functionality. However, if you own a laptop or new Apple keyboard, these shortcuts are very annoying because you must hit the Function key along with the F Key. Right now, there is a bug that does not allow modifier keys for these shortcuts, but I have been assured that it will be fixed soon. While you can turn off the need to hit the function key, it also turns off all of the special actions associated with the keys like Brightness and iTunes controls. To do this, go to System Preferences>Keyboard & Mouse>Keyboard and select the “Use all F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys.”

Mail Act-On also adds some new Rules tabs. If you go to the Rules pane of Mail.app’s preferences you will see that there are now three tabs. The Inbox Rules tab is just like Mail.app’s regular Rules. The “Outbox Rules” tab allows you to make rules apply to messages being sent and the “Keystroke Rules” tab is where Mail-Act-On’s power is really seen. Here you can specify rules that can be applied to messages by just one keystroke. You will usually want the “If” part of the rule to be “Any Message” because the point of this rule is to apply it to every message selected when you invoke the rule. There is also a new field in this type of rule called the “Act-On Key”. When you want to apply a certain “Keystroke Rule” you select some messages and hit Control-[Act-On Key for the rule]. This makes it simpler than ever to apply dozens of rules to messages after they have been received.

Mail Act-On does not require you to have any rules set up to use it; you can just use it as a tool to perform many actions on multiple messages. To invoke Mail Act-On, just hit the function key you set up for Mail Act-On (unless you changed it, F1). You will see a HUD-like window popup with actions that can be done to your selected messages. If you have MailTags installed, you will not only see the “Apply Rules”, “Move”, “Copy” and “Open Folder” actions, but you will also see two more: “Add Keyword” and “Set Project.” You can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll through these or just use your mouse. To lock this window manually, just hit F1 (or Function-F1) again. Then, even after you have performed an action of some messages, the Mail Act-On window will still be there. As you remember, there were also options for setting up shortcuts for each action in the Act-On window in Mail Act-On’s preferences. If you hit one of these key combinations, instead of going straight to actions part of the Act-On window, it will take you to the part of the window that corresponds with the keystroke. Although this window makes it amazingly easy to apply rules of all sorts, if Mail.app loses focus and then gains it again, the Act-On window disappears. It is a nice feature that it is not there when Mail.app doesn’t have focus, but it would be better if it appeared again.

indev’s Mail Act-On retails for $19.95 (an introductory price) and you can download a free 21-day trial from their site. If you are an avid user of Quicksilver, or even if you just want to speed up your Email system, you will love Mail Act-On.

MacPilot has a pretty basic interface. Separate categories are in the top tool bar while the main portion of the window displays the main information. MacPilot has many different categories, like general apps, network settings, tools, and much more. Under General you can change many system and application settings. Just find the application in the list on the left and browse the different hidden features. Under the Disk and Network categories you can find many options and lots of information about your connected disks and networks. MacPilot also has many helpful tools. It even includes a large list of key combos, useful when you forget some.

MacPilot is an easy-to-use application, but sometimes it can just get confusing. But don’t worry! On the bottom of most windows you can find a help guide. Hover your mouse over an item and it explains what it does. This helps you find what you want and avoid doing something wrong. Everything is pretty well organized and easy to find, although a search feature would be nice.

MacPilot is available for $19.95 and has a 15 day free trial. If you don’t want to buy MacPilot you can always try the free Secrets, which has many similar features. These are both great applications for changing some of those hidden settings in Mac OS X.

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.

Another layout change added in Bento 2.0 is the Table View. Before, it was really just a table with all of your records for a certain library. But 2.0 has added many more functionalities, making it even more like a spreadsheet. The biggest improvement here (and there are many) is the ability to change and add fields within the Table View itself. So, if you like a more classic database, you can do everything you need with just the Table View. It should also be pointed out that all tables (as in a file list) have a new look — a more Bento-like look. The old tables looked awkward, but these new ones are super-slick.

Speaking of table views and spreadsheets, Bento 2.0 now has much more spreadsheet support. You can now import from Numbers or Excel documents, and export to them as well. When you go to File>Import>File…, you will get a window asking you where the file is and how to write the values to a database, so no mistakes are made during import. But what these features really mean is that your databases are not attached to Bento; you can export at any time (and if you don’t have iWork or Office, you can always export to the common .csv format).

One little feature that has been added was importing and exporting of Templates (it wasn’t there already?). If you think you have made a killer template (as in the look of your database) and you want to share it with the world, you now can! Just go to File>Export… and choose template and you’re off! When you want to import someone else’s masterpiece, you just go to File>Import>Template… Along with this new support of templates, they have also included 10 new color themes for you to use. So, there are even more possibilities of templates, meaning there should be tons of templates available to download.

Now, there is one huge feature I must talk about. It is called Related Records. Let’s say you have a database for clients, and one for received payments. You want a certain client and their payment to go together. Sure, you could create a new form for payments in the clients database, but that takes time. Well, with this new feature, you can just add a Related Records List to your form. To do this, click the [+] in the Fields list, and choose Related Records List. You then choose a source and a name, and it is completely set up. Then, like any other field, you just drag it onto your form. Now, if you want to add an existing record to the list, click the leftmost button at the bottom of the list. It will prompt you to choose the record you want to add. Once you have chosen, you just click Add To List. If you click the second-to-the-rightmost button, your Field List will turn into a list with the fields of the database that you are using for related records. There will be checkboxes next to fields. You check the fields you want to see in the Related Records List, and you uncheck the ones you don’t want to see.

The last feature I will talk about is Apple Mail support. If you want to attach emails to your records, you now can. You just add a Message List to your fields. Once you have created this field, as usual you drop it onto your database. Then all you have to do to add an email is drag it onto the list in the record you want it to be attached to. Once you have an email in the list, if you hit space (or hit the QuickLook button) you will be able to see that in a QuickLook window in Bento! Emails can usually have a lot to do with databases, and this feature brings them together seamlessly.

FileMaker’s Bento still retails for $49 for a single-seat license and $99 for a family license. It was a great deal before, and it is now even more of a deal! You can download a trial from their site too. I really suggest that you at least try out the new version, because with all these new features, it is really catching up to $300 database tools, but yet has such simplicity that a 5-year-old could use it.