FilmRedux (You Must Have the Developer Tools Installed to Use This

FilmRedux is actually VisualHub. When Techspansion closed, they made VisualHub open-source with a new name, FilmRedux. If you have used VisualHub before, then you will get used to this very easily. And don’t worry, there are many very talented programmers dedicated to this project. To download this, you must use SVN. SVN (or Subversion) is a tool that is used by developers to share their code amongst themselves. Many projects like Adium, Handbrake and Transmission are open-source and use SVN. To download it using SVN, open the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and type, “svn co https://transcoderredux.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/transcoderredux FilmRedux”. Once it is done, navigate to ~/FilmRedux/FilmRedux and open FilmRedux.xcodeproj. Then, just click on the Build and Go toolbar icon in Xcode and you’re off!

QuickTime Pro

QuickTime Pro is the Pro Version of QuickTime. It allows you to export to many formats, with a clean and simple interface (as expected). I would consider this the top-of-the-line of video and audio converting. But, with QuickTime Pro, there are even more things that you can do (that could never be done in VisualHub). You can add Chapter Markers, and control audio and video tracks without having to convert the video file at all (not for chapter markers though). QuickTime Pro is $29.99 (around the same price as VisualHub was) and there is no free trial available, but, it is by a very trusted company.

ffmpegX

ffmpegXuses ffmpeg, just like VisualHub and AudialHub. ffmpeg is a preferred (by developers) audio and video codec. This application has all the same functionalities as VisualHub and AudialHub combined. It gives you a lot of options, so, if you just want a simple program to convert your audio and video, I suggest that you don’t use it. It retails for $15.00, and you can download a free trial from their site.

TubiTunes

TubiTunes is by far my favorite of the apps I am talking about. It is by ManyTricks, a great company, and has a great interface. Some think that it only downloads YouTube videos, but that is just false; if you frag-and-drop a video file onto it, it will give you options for converting it. It uses QuickTime to convert your files (and yet, it costs less than QuickTime Pro), and does a great job of it. Of course, it also allows you to download and convert YouTube videos at ease. If you are looking at a tool that will compare to VisualHub, I highly suggest TubiTunes for is price, and ease-of-use. It only costs about $6.33 (€4.95)! What a deal!

Although it is very sad that Techspansion had to shut its doors, it also gave us a great opportunity to show you some great competitors (well, not anymore). As said, overall, TubiTunes is the winner. I do, however, suggest that you try them all out, and see which one works for you.

Stuf lets you share your computer’s clipboard with other Macs in your network. You just need to open up Stuf on all of your Macs and select which clipboards you want to share. All shared clipboards will show up on the other computers. If you need some security, you can easily set up a password for your clipboards.

Stuff also lets you create multiple clipboards. You always have the system clipboard, but you can drag some of your most used items from the system clipboard into a new clipboard. These items will be saved forever, and are always there for quick access. Stuf even has TinyURL support. You can instantly convert URLs to TinyURLs by right clicking them in the clipboard and selecting “Create TinyURL”. Finally, Stuf has a great search feature. Just type in a phrase in the search box and push enter. All related clipboard items, even networked ones, will show up instantly. There is one small issue I found with Stuf. Stuf doesn’t like Spaces. If Stuf is in one space, it will always show up in that space until you move it. Hopefully this will be fixed in an update.

Overall, Stuf is a great clipboard application. It is a quick, easy way to share your clipboard with other Macs. Stuf is currently available from The Escapers for £12.99 (~$20 USD). There is also a free 30 day trial available from their website.

I can’t speak to the latter two questions, but I want to impart a little DIY innovation to make the most out of your iPhone camera. Want to take close up pictures without breaking your warranty, an old digital camera, or purchasing that ugly clarification case with the sliding macro lens? Follow me…

So the next time you want to take advantage of Evernote’s text recognition with a photo note or scan a barcode and see if your getting a bargain with Snappr, what are you going to do?

The evolution of macro lens solutions for the iPhone has finally produced an option that makes sense to me. By holding a magnifying lens in front of the iPhone lens, you’ll be able to take close up shots of objects within 4″-6″ of the lens. Problem is, I don’t want to carry a magnifying glass in my pocket. I also don’t want to cage my beast of iPhone with a bulky case.

Solution: Talk to your Target Pharmacist.

Target, in their quest to revolutionize prescription packaging, includes a small magnifying strip to assist in reading the small type on the medication bottles. This magnifying strip, placed in front of the iPhone camera lens, clarifies your close up shots. Look at these quickly taken and poorly lit examples intended to simulate conditions in the field below:

iPhone lens:

With Target ClearRX Magnifying Strip:

Well lit shots taken with a steady hand and a smudge free iPhone will look even better!

Next time you’re in Target, see if they’ll give you a magnifying strip and try it out. Scan a couple of bar codes and see if you can’t get a better deal on scrapbooking supplies.

We have reviewed Newsfire OS X and we found it to be a great RSS reader. Newsfire OS X is now available for free here.

The Bento Holiday Pack is a completely free download, and contains a 30-day trial of Bento (enough time to get those holiday cards sent). The only difference between it and regular Bento 2, is that it contains festive themes and templates that can help you organize your cards, gifts and other holiday-related items. This Holiday Pack also helps keep track of information such as price per recipient of gifts (which in the economic situation today, is very important) and you can even make notations of tax-deductable items. You can even make a tally of all your purchases to make sure you stay in your budget!

The Holiday Pack contains many tools for keeping track of holiday cards. There is even a newly included Contacts & Cards template (found in the usual place for templates). With this template, you can keep track of who has sent you holiday cards in the past, pictures of holiday cards you have been sent (you knew you will want to show them to your grandkids someday) and information about recipients of your cards. Getting prepared with a Bento database is easy, and will make sure that you don’t have the last minute stress of finding people’s addresses, or even forgetting people!

Bento, by FileMaker still retails for $49, and you can download a free 30-day trial, with all of these themes and templates. Bento was already a great database tool for general purposes, and can now help you even more with holiday budgets, cards and anything else you do for the holiday (maybe keeping track of who will come to your party). I highly suggest you download this special version if you will be making cards or buying gifts this holiday season; it is like having your own ‘Little Helpers.’

Though I wouldn’t suggest using my friend’s manual method over Garageband, I was able to squeeze the actions into a quirky little Automator application that some MacApperbottoms may find useful.

So step by step, here’s what to do:

1. Download this festively titled Automator application.
2. Find a song in iTunes worth ringtoning.
   
3. Set your preferred duration for the ringtone (get info on selected song).
   
4. Run the Automator application. If your current encoder is set to AAC, then click OK. If it’s on another setting, set it to AAC in the popup, click Continue and restart the Automator application.
   
5. This time your encoder will be set to AAC. Click Continue and choose the song you want to convert to a ringtone.
   
6. This will drop a ringtone file on your desktop. Here’s where the glitchy part is. Open this file from the desktop. iTunes will identify the file currently in the library.
   
   Delete the file that iTunes identifies, then reopen the file from the desktop to deposit the file in the ringtone library.
   

Automator is one of the many underused stock OS X applications. Who knows, maybe this application will encourage you to check out how Automator apps can make your Mac life easier. All that to say, feel free to comment with an easier (free) alternative to this Automator application.

Rulers’ main feature is just putting rulers on your screen. It adds a horizontal ruler to the top of your screen, and a vertical ruler to the left side of your screen. Wherever your mouse is, there will be a red marker on each ruler to show the relative position of your mouse to the rulers (which is not the actual start of your screen). If you don’t want to see the rulers because you are using some of Rulers’ other tools, just go to the point where the two rulers meet and click on the [-]. Whenever you want them back, you just click on the [+] in that same corner. If you want the rulers to be on different sides of the screen, just go to Rulers>Preferences… and change the corner in which the rulers meet. You can change opacity and colors, too.

The only window you will see in Rulers is the inspector. This is where you can see where your mouse is (zoomed in, of course), the mouse’s coordinates, and the color of the pixel your mouse is over. There are two coordinates that it gives for your mouse: relative and absolute. Relative is the position from the rulers, and absolute is the position from the upper-left-hand corner of your screen. The color field shows you the color of the pixel that your mouse is currently over in Hex and RGB codes. The first time you open Rulers, this window will show all three of these fields. If you click the spiral in the upper-right-hand corner of the window, you can toggle between full, only image, and only coordinates and color.

Of course, Rulers doesn’t just show you an inspector and rulers, it has many nice tools too. One of these is lines. Lines are like reference points; you can put them on your screen to always know where x pixels from the left of the screen is. There are a few ways to add these. You can click on the ruler parallel to the line you want to add, and then just drag until it is where you want it. You may be thinking that the whole ruler will drag, but it doesn’t, only a line gets dragged. You can also go to Tools>Add horizontal line and Add vertical line. And finally, you can create an intersection. Just position your mouse where you want the lines to intersect (yes, this will create two lines), and hit Command-I. I am not sure why they let you select the intersection tool from the Tools menu, because it will just create the intersection over the menu item.

There is one other great use for lines — screenshots. If you use Apple’s built-in screenshot commands, you can select only a certain region to grab, but you have no way to take time, and get the position exactly right. Well, with Rulers, you just create a couple lines, and hit Command-3 or Command-4. Command-4 lets you select a region, and then it snaps a picture of only that region to your desktop. Command-3, on the other hand, lets you select a region, and then it copies the picture to your clipboard. These features are great for selecting the exact region that you need for a screenshot.

The last feature I will tell you about is Auto Measuring. With this, you can put your mouse anywhere on your screen, and Rulers will tell you the amount of space between two elements. If you want to know the width of the sidebar of a Website, just put your mouse somewhere on that sidebar (where there is no text), and it will tell you. It gives you the distances across and up-and-down between things. As said above, text usually gets in the way of these measurements, so make sure there is text around when you do it.

omnidea’s Rulers retails for about $16, and you can pick up a trial from their site. It is almost essential to design and some programming work, so if you fit one of those descriptions, I highly suggest that you give it a try.

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.

The first thing that struck me about Clips is its beautiful interface. There are two main windows that you will be using, and both of them look great! The first one is called the Organizer. It has a CoverFlow view of all your clippings. It is exactly like the CoverFlow in the Finder; it has a list view on the bottom and the CoverFlow on the top. It has columns for date, application clipped from, and name. If you are running a slower computer (with Intel integrated GPU and a low amount of RAM), this is going to be the main window that you will be using. If you have a newer or faster computer, or if you’d rather not use the organizer, you’ll probably want to be using the Board.

The Board definitely fits its name; it looks a lot like the Dashboard. When you enter it, your screen darkens, and you will see a lot of floating rectangles. These rectangles are clippings. If you hover over one of them, it will pop out at you so you can read it. There are three views for the board: Circle View, Column View, and Messy View. In Circle View, all of your clippings will form a nice circle; the more clippings, the more cluttered it may look. In Column View, your clippings are displayed in as many columns as can fit on your screen. And in Messy View, clippings can be moved by you, and are basically just randomly spread out. If you have a lot of clippings, you are going to want to use Messy View.

Whichever window you use, you get a sidebar. In this sidebar, you can choose to only view clippings from certain apps, spaces, or clipboards. The built-in application sorting is great. I have never seen another clipboard manager that does this. It makes it so simple to find a clipping that you know you made in application X. The spaces support is also really fun. I have two spaces: one for work, and one for anything else. So, if I know that I copied something while I was working, I can just select that space in the sidebar. Now, clipboards — this really is where most of my refining comes from. You can create a smart clipboard that only looks for things with a certain name, application, space, creation date, and many more fields. Instead of having to constantly move things to a clipboard that you have created, they will be moved there as they are created if they fit the criteria of the smart clipboard. To create one (you have to be in the organizer) you just click on the wheel button in the lower-left-hand-corner. You will then be prompted with a dialogue that looks like any other smart folder creator. Then just enter the information, and it is completely set up! It’s that simple!

The best feature of clips is a feature that you never have to configure; it is already configured for you when you first use it. It is the clipboard monitoring. This monitors everything that you copy using Apple’s built-in clipboard, and automatically adds it to Clips’ library. It is setup to only have 15 monitored clippings in your library at one time, but you can change that by going to Clips,Preferences,General and changing the slider in the middle of the window. If you don’t want Clips to do any monitoring, just uncheck the checkbox labeled “Automatically create Clips from system clipboard.”

The feature that really pulls Clips ahead of the pack of clipboard managers is its abbreviations support. Abbreviations are exactly what they sound like: abbreviations. This brings features of an app like TextExpander or Typinator into a clipboard manager! To create a new abbreviation (in the organizer) right-click on a clipping and select “Assign Abbreviation.” Then, just type in the abbreviation that you want for that clipping and it’s set! It works system-wide!

Clips is one of those apps that tries to have itself in both of your spaces, but it does not work properly. Once the organizer is shown in a certain space, you can see it in both spaces, but when you try to select it in the other space (the one it was not created in), it won’t select! This can get extremely frustrating, but not enough so that it makes the experience of Clips bad; it is just a little flawed.

Clips by Conceited Software. is the prettiest and most feature-full clipboard manager I have seen in a while. It retails for $34.99 and you can pick up a trial from their site. The built-in abbreviations support more than compensates for its high price; compare the price to that of TextExpander, which only has abbreviations. I highly suggest that you try it, and tell us how you think it compares to other clipboard managers.

Yes, it’s no mystery that iPhone users would benefit from copy-and-paste functionality. In fact, the feature frequently tops bloggers’ lists of most requested additions. So, now that we have this bustling App Store and hundreds of eager developers, why are we still forced to memorize and retype names and addresses?

John Casasanta, president of the iPhone app development company Tap Tap Tap, would love to build it, but with the tools Apple gives developers, it’s technically impossible. “Apple doesn’t really provide it in their SDK,” he said. “There’s no real way of doing copy-paste.”

That didn’t stop one developer from trying. One effort involved creating a framework for third-parties to build into their apps that would allow them to share text among a common repository. But because the ability would need the support of each individual developer, it wasn’t a feasible solution. “Ultimately, it wouldn’t really work for anyone because even if third-parties supported it, like even if you could have copy and pasted among two different third-party applications, if Safari and the Mail program … don’t support it, it’s pretty much useless.”

Having developed iClip for the Mac, an app that allows you to save multiple items onto a clipboard, Casasanta is probably the ideal candidate to bring copy-paste to the iPhone. But even if it were technically possible to implement, he says it probably wouldn’t be an overwhelming success. “I get a lot of people asking me if I’m going to do iClip for iPhone,” he said. “Even if it was [feasible to build], I don’t see it being a very big seller compared to some of the things that are a little more mainstream.”

Many iPhone users would probably disagree with Casasanta. (I would guess there’s a reason it tops most feature requests.) But it’s a moot point because this is one add-on that Apple won’t be able to push off on third-party developers to take care of.

Head over to the Keyboard & Mouse Preference Pane, and on the bottom of the Keyboard Shortcuts pane, you should see the option for “Full Keyboard Access.” Simply click on the option for “All Controls” and you should now be able to start tabbing through dialog boxes and windows. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard combination of Ctrl+F7 to enable this feature. When you see a little blue ring around any dialog options, you can tab through them to select a different option. You can use Shift+Tab to go backwards, and the Space bar to replicate the mouse click. This simple option makes it nice and quick to deal with one moderately annoying default “feature” of Mac OS X.

Think about a piece of paper with text on it. You can draw on it, annotate it and white out text. This is exactly what PDFPen lets you do to PDFs. It turns a PDF into a piece of paper. However, that’s not all it does. It has many other great features; one of which is OCR.

OCR (optical character recognition) is a technology used to read text. When you scan a piece of paper onto your computer, even if you scan to a PDF, it is really just an image. OCR lets you turn that image into a PDF with real text. This makes it searchable and editable. To OCR a document in PDFPen, just go to Edit>OCR… You really won’t need to even go to that menu to do it, because when you open up a PDF that’s just an image, PDFPen will ask you if you want it to OCR the document, the page, or not OCR at all. If your PDF is a little skewed (you may have scanned it that way) then I suggest that you don’t OCR it, because the text will come out very weird. I have yet to find a PDF de-skewing/rotating program, so your best choice is just to rescan the document. Having rotating in small increments built into PDFPen might be a very nice feature. I have also noticed that about 50% of the time, PDFPen will crash while doing OCR, so hopefully they make the OCR a little more slow-computer-friendly (although my machine passes their minimum requirements for OCR).

As said above, PDFPen turns a PDF into a piece of paper (metaphorically of course). Well, I’m going to tell you about a few tools that it has for this purpose. The first is the Text Tool. This is the second-leftmost toolbar button in the set of four buttons. If you select it, you can just drag a text box onto your PDF. Then, you can edit it, and that text will become part of the PDF (when looked at with other PDF tools). Another one of these tools is the Scribble Tool. This is the second-to-rightmost toolbar button in the set of four buttons. With this, you can draw  (i.e. with a tablet) onto your PDF. What is drawn will appear as an object on your PDF (it will have a bounding box, etc), and it will appear as an image in other programs. The last of these tools is the Image Tool. This is exactly what it sounds like; it lets you add images to your PDFs. To use it, either drag an image onto your PDF or select the toolbar button (the rightmost toolbar button on the toolbar). This image can then be moved and rotated to your liking.

There is another set of tools in PDFPen that can be used to markup and annotate text. The first kind is the Highlighting Tool. All you have to do is select some text, and click-and-hold on the down arrow on the Highlight toolbar item. You can then choose the color of the highlighter, or the type of markup you want. Then, there is the Note Tool. With this, you can add a little note icon by some text, and when double-clicked, it will display a note. To add one to your PDF, just go to Tools>Note Tool. Then, just click on your PDF, and the icon will appear. You can then move this to where you want it, and double-click to add text. However, if you want to be able to have this not associated with either a word, or a few words, you can place it close by, but there is not a way to associate it.

The last major set of tools I will talk about are what make PDFPen what it is. These are the tools that allow you to edit text and images already on the PDF! If you created a PDF, and you realized that you misspelled one word, you don’t want to have to re-export it, so you can simply edit the text. To do this, select the text that you would like to edit and click on the Correct Text toolbar icon (it may take a second based on how much text you selected). Then, all you must do is enter the new text, and it has been changed! If you want to edit an image, just click-and-hold on the leftmost toolbar icon in the set of four icons, and select the cursor item. Then, just click on an image, and you can move and resize it! However! This does not work for all images! It only works on PDFs that were rendered in PDFPen! I have also found that much of the time, you lose formatting with the text that you are editing.

PDFPen, by SmileOnMyMac, retails for only $49.95 and there is a Pro version for only $99.95. The pro version has two extra features: multi-platform form creation, and index sheet creation. You can download a free trial of both from their Web site too. If you compare these prices to something like Acrobat, you will see how great of a deal they are, not to mention how much more Mac-like they are and how great their support is. If you work with PDFs at least a few times a month, I highly suggest you give this a try, and tell us what you think.

As said above, the major new feature added is support for FTP and FTPS network drives. In case you didn’t know, FTP is the most common form of connecting to a network drive. There is also FTPS (do not mistake this with SFTP), or FTP/SSH, which adds a lot of security to FTP. Setting up an FTP drive is just like setting up any other drive in ExpanDrive. You just click New Drive in the main window and you get a popup with a lot of options. Then, if you want to set up an SFTP/SSH drive, you select SFTP/SSH from the popup, and if you want to setup an FTP/FTPS drive, you just select FTP/FTPS (Beta). Lastly you just enter any other information that you need to connect to the drive. As you can see, this feature is still in Beta, so it is not perfected. But, it has worked perfectly so far for me.

There is also a major bug fix added in ExpanDrive 1.3. In previous versions, if you had a lagging connection, you might have gotten a -36 Error (you wouldn’t be able to connect to the drive). Well, that was because of the way that ExpanDrive used to see if you’d lost connection with the server. Instead of using OS X notifications, it used its own system, which didn’t work very well. Well, now it does use OS X notifications, so it knows if you can’t connect to the server, or if you just don’t have Internet. So, for those of you who experienced this major bug, it has been fixed, and ExpanDrive can be useful for you again.

The last two features added in ExpanDrive 1.3 are fairly minor. One is localizations. There are now localizations for German, Romanian, French and Danish. So, if you are from one of those countries, you can now actually use ExpanDrive! The last new feature is the ability to see Beta releases of ExpanDrive. If you are like me and love having the absolute newest version of your software (or if you just want to help the developer tackle bugs), this is a great improvement.

ExpanDrive by Magnetk retails for $29, and you can download a free 30-day trial from their site. If you had the 30-day trial before, but never bought it, they have reset all trials, so you can download 1.3 and see if these new features are exactly what you need. They will also be doing this for every other major release of ExpanDrive. Version 1.3 adds a great new feature that makes it the awesomest ExpanDrive ever!

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.

The first thing you will notice about NoteBook is how much it actually looks like a notebook. It has the fringes and everything! It makes it seem much more like taking notes than when done in Pages.

When you first open NoteBook you will be prompted with a dialogue that lets you create a new notebook from a starting point. You will notice that there are many options, so NoteBook is not really just for notes; it can be for anything that involves writing! The automatically selected option is Take Notes, which is what most people use it for. You can also choose to learn how to use NoteBook by just clicking Learn to Use NoteBook in a Few Easy Steps. If you uncheck the Show at start-up checkbox, you will never see this dialogue unless you go to File>New from Starting Point…

Two of the best new features in NoteBook 3.0 are Sticky Notes and Sticky Flags. These provide an easy way to jot down a little something that doesn’t have anything to do with the notes you’re taking. For example, you could make a sticky note that says “Remember to look up this person” if you are taking history notes. Then when you’re done with that Sticky Note, you just drag it off the notebook. Sticky Flags are a little bit different. With a Sticky Flag, you add a line of text to it, and put it somewhere, kind of like a marker. Sticky Flags come in a few flavors: plain old Sticky Flags, Fax Flags, Send Flags, Important Flags, Note Flags, and Urgent Flags. For all but the first kind, Notebook will put its type (e.g. Note) on the right side, and you can edit the text on the left side. With both Sticky Notes and Flags, you can drag them halfway out of the notebook to mark a certain page, and then whenever you want to get to that page, you just click on the part that’s sticking out.

Another great feature added in NoteBook 3.0 is tablet support. If you are someone like me who likes using their tablet to write on their computer, then you will love this feature. First, you should probably add Ink to your toolbar by going to View>Customize Toolbar… and adding Ink to the toolbar. Once you have done this, you can go to drawing mode (there will be a little doodle in the Ink toolbar item) or text recognition mode (there will be an “a” in the Ink toolbar item). To get to drawing mode, click once, and to get to text recognition mode, click twice. In drawing mode, you can just draw little doodles and diagrams. If you go into text recognition mode, you will want to write only text. Once you have written some text, NoteBook will use its text recognition algorithm to figure out what you wrote. It (what NoteBook thinks you wrote) will then appear right on top of the written text. If a word does not say what your wrote, then just click on it, and you will get a pulldown with other possible words. In this pulldown, you can also edit the text (what it thought you wrote), or just delete the recognition (in case you were drawing a doodle when in text recognition mode). I want to point out that this only works with tablets; you cannot just use your mouse.

One simple but extremely useful new feature in NoteBook 3.0 is the ability to rip out a page from your notebook. To rip out a page, just option-click a page in a divider page, and that page will be put in a new window. While you still have that page separately open, you cannot get to it within your notebook; you have to use the newly appeared window. Once you want the page to go back into the notebook, you just close the window, and everything will go back to normal. This can be very useful if you took notes on one page, and want to write a summary about them on another page.

These are just some of the amazing new features added in NoteBook 3.0. Here is a list of all of the new features. NoteBook 3.0 retails for $49.95 for a regular license and $29.95 for an academic license. Until October 31, you can upgrade from NoteBook 2.0 for only $19.95, and then it will go back to its normal price of $29.95. You can also download a trial from the same site. NoteBook 3.0 is an amazing update to an already amazing app, making it my favorite academic tool, and I hope it will become yours too.

iShowU HD and HD Pro still have the same basis as iShowU: real time screen capturing. This means that there is no need to encode your move after it has been made, because it is being encoded in real time. This is a feature that, in my opinion, moves iShowU ahead of most other screen capturing apps. It also has the usual system audio and microphone recording, pausing, and mouse following.

One of the simplest ‘duh’ features that was added in HD and HD pro is custom backgrounds. Instead of having to use another app to cover everything on your desktop, and change to a simple wallpaper, you can just do it right in the app. In the advanced pane, just choose an image under the ‘Custom background’ field, and that will be set as your desktop every time it opens. If you want to have no icons on your desktop, just uncheck ‘Show icons on desktop’. Of course, when you quit, your icons will be displayed and your background will be set back to your original one.

Another feature that has been added in most other screen capturing apps already is iSight and webcam support. If you want to be in your video along with your computer, you just click the Camera toolbar item, and a box will appear with your iSight. You can move, resize and adjust settings of this box, too. To adjust the settings, change the items in the Quick Properties HUD that popped up. When you are finished editing it, just click elsewhere on the screen.

One amazing feature for those of us with slow computers, though only available with HD Pro, is the Low CPU usage mode. When I say amazing, I really mean it. This mode uses about 1/3 the amount of CPU that regular mode uses! To enable it, just hit the checkbox labeled ‘Start in Low CPU mode’, and when you record, this mode will be enabled. The only downside to it is the fact that iShowU will have to compress the video afterwards, so it won’t end up being real-time capturing.

There are a few other nice improvements that are worth mentioning. You can now upload directly to a service like YouTube, by just right-clicking on a video in the bottom of the window, and clicking Upload > YouTube. Right now it only supports YouTube, but the folks at shinywhitebox have released an API, so users can make uploaders for others and release them to the public.

Another improvement is its ability to record fullscreen apps. Before, if you opened a game that went fullscreen, you would have to worry about the capture area, resolution, etc. But now, you don’t. As soon as you open up a fullscreen app, it automatically adjusts all the settings for you! How’s that for service!

shinywhitebox’s iShowU HD Pro retails for $59.95, and HD retails for only $29.95. For a screen capturing app, that is pretty cheap. It also has many features that other screen capturing apps don’t have, so I suggest that you give it a try.

Bento is a simpler and more Mac-like version of the FileMaker software. It works in the same way, so it’s not that big of a switch from FileMaker Pro. However, as I said, it’s simpler; it does not have all the features of FileMaker Pro, so if you need some of FileMaker Pro’s more advanced features, or if you are using databases professionally, I suggest you stick with FileMaker Pro.

When you first open Bento there will already be four databases in your Source List. These databases are Address Book, iCal Events, iCal Tasks, and Projects. The first one automatically syncs with Address Book, and the second and third automatically sync with iCal, so you never need to add a new item when you add a new task, event, or person. You may ask, “Why do I need a database for these things when they are already stored in their own applications?” Well, with Bento, you can add custom fields for things like Nickname, Middle Name, or anything you want to contacts! Or you can add things like URLs and pictures to iCal Events. If you want more options for these things, then you will just love these pre-made databases.

One of the most interesting features of Bento is its templates. When you go to File>New Library, or click the [+] in the lower left-hand corner, you will be prompted with a Template dialogue. This is where you can choose a pre-made template. It has ones for projects, contacts, to-dos, and many other common databases. In that same dialogue, you can also enter a name for your database. They have enough templates to get you started, but when you really get into Bento, you will probably just want to use the Blank template as a starting point.

Once you have created a database, you will probably want to add some custom fields. In the Fields panel, there will be many common fields that you can drag onto your database, or you can create your own! Just hit the [+] in the lower right-hand corner and you will be prompted with a dialogue. You first have to choose a field type, such as Text. Then you have to add a name, and options based on what you choose. Once you have chosen all that information, just just click Create, and the field will appear in the Field list. All you have to do is drag it onto your form where you want it to be, and you’re off!

For each database, you have things called Forms. For instance, if you have a database for issue tracking, you can have one form for basic information, and then another for the details. It will keep your database clean and uncluttered. When you create a blank database (or use most other templates) there will be only one form. You can rename it by right-clicking on the top bar and clicking Rename <the current name of the form>. You will then be prompted with a dialogue where you choose a new name for the form. To edit the contents of a form, select it in the top bar, and then click the hammer and wrench toolbar icon. You can also right-click on the form, and click Customize Form. To add a new form, just click on the (+) in the top bar and you will be prompted with a dialogue where you choose a name for it. When I first learned about forms, they sounded complicated, but once you get used to them, you will find that they are very useful.

FileMaker’s Bento retails for only $49 for a single license or $99 for a 5-license family pack. You can pick up a free 30-day trial from their site. It is a great tool for making simple databases, and even some advanced ones. I suggest you download it out and check out all the ways in which you can use it. You may be surprised how useful it can be; I know I was.

Check out the video for a tip on how to remove volumes from your desktop as well as access them using Volumizer.

By using Volumizer, you can easily access your volumes from the menubar, dock, or both. Using the Finder preference window to remove volumes from the desktop may not be your bag. Either way, Volumizer makes accessing your drives instant, even with loads of windows in between you and the desktop. Hopefully, this may be something that works for you and your workflow.  You can pick up your free copy of Volumizer from Greg Weston of Bastion Products.

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

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

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

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

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

Squishy Sheds its Shell

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

Cells Just

Wanna Have Fun

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

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

Disco Diplomacy – The Creature Stage

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

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

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

Manfred Sneaks up on a Skeleton

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

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

Disco Diplomacy

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

Sporadic Strategy – The Tribal/Civilization Stages

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

Manfred's Mariachi Barbeque

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

Tribes Clash in Battle

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

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

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

The Birth of a Civilization

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

The Final Frontier – The Space Stage

Stars, Asteroids, Black Holes, Oh My!

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

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

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

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One of Many Planets

Spore and the Evolution of Mac Gaming – The Verdict

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Code Collector Pro is basically a place to put long snippets of code that you don’t want to have to remember. I have found that it is best to put anything and everything that you could possible need, because you never know when you will need it.

If you like everything to be organized then Code Collector Pro has a great feature for you: smart groups (and regular ones too). With its smart groups, you can organize snippets by name, tags, description, language, license, and source. So, you can make one folder for Objective-C, one for HTML, etc. This feature would be even better, though, if you could have groups within groups.

As I mentioned above, you can give snippets tags. These are not only useful when sorting, but also when searching. Everything that is associated with a snippet (e.g., name, description, tags) can be searched for. So, if you have a huge library of thousands of snippets, searching will sometimes be the easiest way to find things. However, if you search in a group (or smart group), it will search throughout the whole library, and not just the group, even though the group is still highlighted in the sidebar.

My favorite feature (by far) is the ability to just drag a snippet into any Cocoa application, and it will put the code from that snippet where you dragged it! Although it may seem like a useless feature, because you can just copy and paste, it saves you lots of time, and is just simpler. When you need to use hundreds of snippets, you will see how much time you save.

Another thing that Code Collector Pro has that you will not find in something like TextExpander is bundles. If you are familiar to TextMate, then you will know what these are. Bundles are used by Code Collector Pro to highlight code based on the type of object something is. Like in Objective-C, variables will be highlighted in different colors than id’s. You can even use bundles made for TextMate! And if you don’t use TextMate, Code Collector Pro has built in bundles for common languages. It would be nice if they updated their Objective-C bundle to support the new Objective-C 2.0, though.

The last feature I will tell you about is Code Collector.net. Code Collector.net is a way to share snippets with people anywhere. To turn on syncing with Code Collector.net, just go to Preferences->Sharing and click Get an Account. Once you have your account, just put your information into the fields and your off!. The only problems you will find are, when browsing Code Collector.net, there are a lot of the exact same snippets because some people never delete the example ones.

Code Collector Pro, by M Cubed Software, retails for about $29, and you can pick up a free trial as well. I would say that Code Collector Pro is for moderate to advanced programmers, but some beginners may find it helpful, too. It has saved me a lot of time, and I hope that it will do the same for you.

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

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

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

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

There are a number of feature updates for each of the individual applications in the suites, including the abil