When you received your new Mac it included iChat which you could use to connect to AOL’s Instant Messenger service. iChat is a fine application and particularly useful for video chats, but in this article I am going to try and talk you out of using it for normal text based chats and talk you into switching to the free application Adium.
Friend’s List
If you have a number of people that you chat with (I have around 100 people in my buddy list) then I find the Adium a more efficient display. You do give up seeing the current icon for people but most people I know have the same icon day after day. iChat supports groups as does Adium but if you only want to see the people who are online and use groups in iChat you can have all of the friends who are offline moved to a Offline friends group. Adium allows you to group your buddies and also show or not show offline buddies completely independently. Continue Reading »
Apple thinks you should try their digital photography program Aperture. They think if you try Aperture that you will like it. They believe that so strongly that they want to let you try it free for 30 days.
Manage thousands of images with complete control and flexibility. Sort through shoots and choose selects in record time. Make professional-quality adjustments with simple, powerful tools. Whether you shoot RAW or JPEG, Aperture puts everything you need into one unrivaled application. Try it free for 30 days—and don’t worry, Aperture never changes a pixel of your originals. So start today, experiment with abandon, and see how simply amazing your photography can be.
Over the years Ambrosia Software has made a number of great games (and utilities) for the Macintosh and the company has done it again with its latest creation Sketchfighter 4000. Ambrosia describes the program this way:
Remember those super-cool space ships you doodled on graph paper in Middle School? Pen strokes furiously waging massive intergalactic battles in History class with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance? Well they have sprung to life in SketchFighter 4000 Alpha!
I know the sketches they are talking about although in my case I drew them on a chalk board and not in my school binder. It is magical to see these sketches come to life. I love the look of the program. I love that when you destroy an enemy it leaves a smudge on the screen as if you had erased the drawing incompletely. I have not mastered the game yet, but look forward to trying.
Some tasks like getting a man to the moon are complicated and the systems needed to accomplish them are complicated. But some things, like keeping track of the things you need to do, are not complicated and the software you need to manage them should also be uncomplicated. ToDo from Omicron Software Systems is just that kind of software, uncomplicated. Continue Reading »
One of the programs that I keep on my doc that is very helpful in updating my blog and my podcast with pictures is a simple and free program called ImageWell from Xtralean Software. ImageWell is a simple image editor that lets you resize, annotate, edit, resize and publish images.
Simply drag an image onto the ImageWell icon and it will open up the program’s small main window. This window let’s you rename, resize and publish an image. Images can be published to a folder or a web site. To publish to a web site the web site needs to support FTP or WebDav (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) formats. ImageWell can also publish the image to your .Mac account. When you send the image to your web site the HTML to display that image is added to the clipboard:
<img src="http://chris2x.com/wp-content/test.jpg" width="320" height="240"/>
You can go and paste that code into your blog or other HTML document. If you are adding this picture to a discussion board instead, you can also configure the program to send the bbcode style syntax used by many discussion boards (such as the MacCast forum):
[img]http://chris2x.com/wp-content/test.jpg[/img]
ImageWell will also allow you to edit the image before publishing. You can crop, add text, add comic strip style caption balloons, add arrows or annotations.
ImageWell can also rotate, add shape masks like a heart (not quite as useful for your blog unless you are a 14 year old girl) and/or add a watermark.
ImageWell is not PhotoShop and will not replace it for general purpose photo editing but when you want to quickly publish a photo to your web site and reference it from an HTML document or a discussion board few programs will compete with the ease of use of ImageWell.
Apple announced great news for tired air travelers and harried flight attendants today:
Apple® today announced it is teaming up with Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United to deliver the first seamless integration between iPod® and in-flight entertainment systems. These six airlines will begin offering their passengers iPod seat connections which power to charge their iPods during flight and allow the video content on their iPods to be viewed on the their seat back displays.
This kind of news makes you want to go out and jump on an airplane but we won’t start seeing planes with this feature until mid 2007.
What do you do when you have a lot of little pieces of information: passwords, notes, ideas of what to blog for MacCast, show ideas for your podcast, frequent flyer numbers, receipts, etc. The shoe box under your bed has gotten full and using the Stickies application only gets you so far. One option for managing this collection of information is SOHO Notes from Chronos. SOHO Notes is an updated version of an older program from Chronos called Sticky Brain.
The simplest way to put information into SOHO Notes is to open up the application, choose a folder in your hierarchy and then select new note. You can then find this note again by browsing the hierarchy of folders you have created or by searching for it (very quickly) from the SOHO Notes search icon on the menu bar of your Mac (or using Spotlight). So far so good, but not worth the $40 that this program will cost.
But SOHO Notes will allow you to store and retrieve more than just rich text notes. You can also store bookmarks, web archives, PDFs, images, movies, audio, and other attachments. But, you say, I can already create all of those types of files in the file system and search for them using spotlight. Go ahead say it, I’ll wait. Continue Reading »
One of the utilities that I wonder how I ever got along without is called Jumpcut by Steve Cook.
My day job is working for an internet company so I live in my browser for hours and hours everyday. I am constantly copying or cutting and then pasting a piece of information from one place to another or more likely more than one piece of information. For example, before Jumpcut if I had 3 pieces of information to copy from someplace into a form I would have to do this one piece of information at a time, often switching windows or applications in between. Jumpcut lets me paste in any of the last 25 things that I cut or copied into the clipboard. Instead of doing a paste with command-V, I use control-option-V to pop up a transparent overlay that shows the current clipboard. If I hit the arrow keys while continuing to hold down the control and option keys then I can scroll through any of the last 25 clipboards. When I am done, I have pasted the information and also changed the current contents of the clipboard.
Google wants to know that they love you. Well… that’s not quite true, they want you to know that they love your Mac. Google has started an Official Google Mac Blog to reach out to Mac zealots users like us. The first post to this blog tells Mac Users:
If you sit down at your Mac, start up your browser, and search for “Google mission statement”, this is what you’ll see:
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
We’re pretty serious about that mission, including the “universally accessible” part. It means making products that everyone can use – including Mac users. We want to provide great products and services to the tens of millions of Mac users around the world, because it’s the right thing to do, and because Mac users inside and outside Google demand it. That’s why we’ve recruited some of the best, most passionate Mac people out there for a Mac Engineering team.
The idea behind a new program ScreenRecycler is that most Mac users have some old computer sitting right next to their main computer on their desk that is gathering dust. ScreenRecycler is intended to let you use that machine as a second monitor for your main computer. Continue Reading »
When you received your new Mac it included iChat which you could use to connect to AOL’s Instant Messenger service. iChat is a fine application and particularly useful for video chats, but in this article I am going to try and talk you out of using it for normal text based chats and talk you into switching to the free application Adium. 
Over the years Ambrosia Software has made a number of great games (and utilities) for the Macintosh and the company has done it again with its latest creation 
One of the programs that I keep on my doc that is very helpful in updating my 
What do you do when you have a lot of little pieces of information: passwords, notes, ideas of what to blog for MacCast, show ideas for your podcast, frequent flyer numbers, receipts, etc. The shoe box under your bed has gotten full and using the Stickies application only gets you so far. One option for managing this collection of information is 
Google wants to know that they love you. Well… that’s not quite true, they want you to know that they love your Mac. Google has started an 
