Archive for the 'Featured' Category

Nowadays, with all these new features in Leopard, you would expect that Apple would give us an app that would make images look, well, good. I don’t mean changing color, hue, saturation, brightness, etc. I mean adding simple effects like a reflection or a shadow. you could go out and buy Photoshop or Pixelmator, but there is a much easier option. There is Picturesque.

Picturesque, by Acqualia, has just been updated to version 2.0 (for the Apple Design Awards). Version 2.0 has improved the interface, the ease of use, and the utilization of new Leopard features. It makes adding some of these simple effects very simple. You really just have to click a few buttons and you’re off.

MacApper is a well established and respected Mac blog. Opened in February 2007 the blog already sees visitors in excess of 250,000/month and has a strong, loyal, and vocal following. The daily lineup focuses on Mac applications, interviews with OS X developers, Mac related tutorials, Application news/updates, opinion editorials, and software giveaways.

We are always looking for writers enthusiastic about OS X applications and similar Apple based geekery. We are currently seeking highly motivated individuals to contribute Mac related articles on a weekly basis. Qualified individuals will be asked to contribute articles and reviews, collaborate with colleagues, and help coordination of weekly columns and articles. We are looking for expert knowledge of OS X and the Mac platform and the ability to write engagingly about our subject matter.

One of the most frustrating features of iTunes is the fact that you may be able to share your library with others on your network, but in the later iterations of the popular music-organizing app, it’s been virtually impossible to “share” your tunes with those other users…until now. Mojo for Mac (and Windows) allows you to connect to your friends’ iTunes libraries and help yourself to their songs to supplement your own library.

The difference between a new computer user and a power user is all in the keyboard. With the many menu commands in Mac OS X, if you really want to save time on your computer, you have to use keyboard shortcuts. Though it can be hard to memorize all the keyboard shortcuts in all your applications at once. Keycue, from Ergonis Software, presents a viable solution to this problem by allowing you to learn new shortcuts as you work.

Lets face it — TextEdit is underpowered. It is the only text editor Apple gives us, and it’s just that; a text editor. You can go in certain directions and get a CSS editor, or an HTML editor, but what about an Everything editor? That is where TextMate comes in. Just as it is dubbed, it is the missing editor for OS X.

Since Apple introduced the framework, Core Image powered editing applications have sprung up like Starbucks. From Pixelmator to Acorn, they’re everywhere to be found. Even so, there’s always room to innovate. Rhapsoft’s LiveQuartz, now at version 1.8, is a good example.

LiveQuartz has most of the standard image editing tools you might expect from a modern image editing application: layers, a rudimentary brush engine, selection lasso tools, a text engine, and filters. Like other editors powered by Core Image, LiveQuartz is fast and its filters operate in near realtime. Notable features which LiveQuartz lacks include layer styles and alpha masks.

Some people have a hard time keeping track of where all their money goes. Cents, from MacMage, is a very simple application that helps you do just that! You can add different purchases to Cents and it will tell you how much you have spent. Cents is a very simple app, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.

My wife and I had been pretty happy with the copy of Quicken that came with our computers. All that changed a few weeks ago, when she told me that Quicken was no longer sufficient for our needs. As she is a professional accountant and I am just a writer, I didn’t question her. So started the search for a new finance program/service.

Using flash cards is a great way to study for an exam, but sometimes they can be annoying to make. What if you just want to make a short note? Or one with a picture? With Mental Case you can easily create flash cards or short notes.

Mental Case has a very clean interface; the toolbar on top lets you create cases and notes and start viewing a slideshow, and a bar on the left lets you select your cases so you can edit your notes.

One of the most grudging management tasks is renaming files, especially when you have many and they all need to be similarly renamed. For example: you want to rename a dozen photos from “DSC003123.jpg” to something more meaningful like “Wedding-Pictures-23.jpg.” Dare to be Creative has released version 3 of it’s batch renaming utility, the aptly named Renamer4Mac, a solution to this mind numbing task.

Renamer4Mac allows you to rename files with 5 variables. Search & Replace and Convert Case do exactly what they suggest. Insert and Remove allows you to respectively add or remove characters at any point in a filename. Finally, Renamer4Mac can number files in different ways, as in with numbers or letters or a combination of the two.

There are many functionalities of USB and Firewire external drives that make things easier — saving directly onto them, backing up to them as a drive, and easiness to mount and see in Finder. These features have finally been brought to servers and online drives with ExpanDrive.

ExpanDrive, by Magnetk adds the functionalities listed above to network drives and servers. It treats all drives equally. Now, there are already a lot of file transfer apps and apps that connect to servers, but ExpanDrive is much different from all of these. Instead of having an external application to connect to a server, ExpanDrive uses Finder directly. It mounts a new drive in the Finder that is treated as a regular external drive rather than a server.

There are currently many RSS applications out for Mac, but none of them are quite like Times. Times reinvents the user interface of an RSS reader by making it look similar to a newspaper. With a simple interface, Times makes it easy for anyone to read and view RSS feeds. It also has many special effects to make it look even better.

Nowadays, there are so many distractions to keep you from your work: social networking, surfing the web, AIM and Twitter, just to name a few. There are many ways to keep us from using these things, and today I am going to talk about one of the easier ones. It’s called WriteRoom.

WriteRoom, by Hog Bay Software is a tool for working without distractions. It puts a black (or any color you want) background behind a text editor. It is very easy to use, and really does help to keep you from getting distracted, even if you have ADD!

Organizing digital videos isn’t easy. The vast majority of music files have been in MP3 format since the digital music explosion, but videos are a different story: MP4, H.264, DiVx, Xvid, WMV, M4V, MOV, AVI containers. When you download a movie, you never really know what to expect, and neither does iTunes, which only plays a limited number of video file types. So users who download movie files are forced to use QuickTime or third-party software to convert them to another format, which is always a lengthy process. Fortunately, though, there is an alternative:

iTunes has many often-forgotten features. Among them are the web radio, visualizer, and (what I think is the coolest) shared music libraries. iTunes users on the same wireless network can share their entire music libraries (or only specific playlists) with each other by turning on “Sharing” in iTunes’ preferences (in either the Mac or PC version of iTunes). Once both computers are setup to share libraries, users at both ends can browse each other’s libraries and stream each other’s music. However, there is no way to download the music; users can only listen.