Picturesque is a program that does one thing incredibly well: it spruces up images that you want to display online. Picturesque is not intended to be an effects generator for printed photographs, but rather serves the purpose of adding some nice effects to web images that would take you a couple of hours using Photoshop.
Hear is JoeSoft’s newest toy for Mac users, and yes you can spend a couple of days playing with it. Hear is a small application that installs a daemon in your system. It’s fun and it actually can make a bad pair of speakers or headphones sound much better, but it only works with the analogue output of your Mac.
If you happen to be in the market for a GTD application, you are certainly pampered when you’re running Mac OS X. Under Leopard, GTD applications have even seen an explosive boost as some of the synchronisation functionality offered in some of these programs heavily depend on Leopard technologies.
With the Mac increasingly becoming an all-round tool of productivity for organising anything from your personal life to your enterprise-class creative or publishing work, GTD and mind mapping are becoming essential concepts and technologies. Started under Tiger, most of the GTD applications currently available for Mac OS X are only now finding a large market of eager users.
Outspring Mail 1.0.5 is the e-mail client that has been on my system since it was released. In total, I’ve been testing Outspring Mail since version 1, holding off the review hoping the e-mail application would become more robust, faster, and less crash-prone. Version 1.0.5 certainly became less crash-prone, but after well over 2 months, the Junk Mail system still is in Training phase with about 400 spam messages fed into it in order to get it to automatically move towards Active Service mode. And suggestions for storing mail? Outspring Mail isn’t intelligent enough for my organising system, that’s for sure.
The third wave of unified communications technology is characterized by robust, interoperable, server-based tools that integrate with desktop and mobile clients to give information workers access to voice, fax, e-mail, and other data from wherever they are and allows users to use the telephone to manage their email, calendar, and personal contacts.
Creating disc labels is easy with Disc Cover 2, but just as with discLabel, you can ask yourself the question whether Disc Cover would be used by professional designers. Just like Bryan Bedell, I don’t believe designers will ever use tools that are primarily aimed at creating a design fast. But Disc Cover 2 does have a well balanced feature set and you can get good results with it.
Just as I did with discLabel last week, I asked Belight Software about their opinion of where and how Disc Cover is used. Helen Nersesova, Belight Software’s PR lady answered them.
SmileOnMyMac has been making DiscLabel for quite some years now. Throughout that period, the application evolved from a simple disc labelling program to what seems like a powerhouse of disc labelling. With DiscLabel 5.x you can add automatically flowing text on a disc label, get access to an open source clipart library, add image and layer effects, and basically do most things you can also do in Photoshop or Illustrator --but only on CD/DVD related media.
DiscLabel gained the ability to output to paper labels, HP’s DVD Tattoos, LightScribe and now also the Dymo DiscPainter. Its interface grew to accommodate the ability to label jewelboxes as well. But the question remains: do professional designers use applications like DiscLabel, or do they still grab their copy of Illustrator or Photoshop to create the design? And if they do, is there a use for DiscLabel at all?
Enjoying digital terrestrial TV wherever it is available, receiving analogue or cable TV, or recording VHS tape recordings into digital format: it’s all possible with the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid. This hardware is a big USB stick with a coaxial connector at the top and a mini-USB connector at the side. It’s amazing what such a small device is capable of, but the most amazing is what the software can do.
When the new FTP client Flow was released, I decided it would be a good idea to compare three of the many FTP clients available for Mac OS X today. I ended up with Transmit, Interarchy and Flow. Transmit is the FTP client I use myself. Interarchy was my favourite for a long time until I found out about Transmit. When Transmit was released some years ago, I found Interarchy lacking the interface quality I looked for. And now, Flow seemed to take over from Transmit. When I saw the screenshots on the developer’s web site, I thought this must be the new Transmit.
Book Collector is Dutch firm Collectorz’s idea of a book collection software. Book Collector has built-in barcode scanner support, automatic downloading of book information from all Amazon stores, the Library of Congress, the British National Library, Librarie Nationale de France, Barnes & Nobles, etc. It has a full-blown borrowing management system, supports extra information you can add to a book, even add cover images using a TWAIN scanner. Some of these features don’t work on Mac OS X, but so far I have yet to see a better, more powerful book collection application.
Book Collector comes with a good manual, explaining in clear terms how you get your books in the database, both in Wizard and Advanced mode. The manual is great, but totally unnecessary in my opinion, as the program is almost totally self-explanatory. From the manual, I could deduct Book Collector is not just for people who are used to working with such software, but also for people who aren’t --let’s call them part-time voluntary librarians.
We tend to collect an incredible amount of media, books, folders and other “things” that we can’t throw away because they can have some value for later use. For example, I collect and save my editorial and other work on off-line media. At the time I used 5"25 MO-discs, but these days I use Verbatim’s Archive DVDs because they’re specially created for archival purposes.
“Viruses on Mac OS X don’t exist.” “There’s no threat from viruses, Trojans, and other malicious critters when you’re working with Leopard.” Two statements we want you to take with a grain of salt. As Mac OS X becomes more popular, the threat will become more serious. And while I am one of those people who are convinced we will never experience what Windows users have to go through, you shouldn’t solely rely on Apple to keep your system free of malicious software. Especially not if you’re using Boot Camp or one of the virtualisation products that let you run Windows on your Mac.
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