I am not a graphic artist nor do I have the intention of becoming one. But as I have learned it is best to be a jack of all trades when it comes to digital communications as no one might understand your prerogatives as well as yourself (they would not necessarily share their priority either). You might end up having to change a background picture in the middle of the night for a presentation or a web site. Adding to the Swiss knife skills of a typical Office user, here is Pixelmator.

Pixelmator reminds me of Adobe’s Photoshop in its infancy which is not bad considering the $59 price. There are still a few bugs in this fairly recent software but it looks promising. Save often as they say (text layers have a tendency to evaporate). The interface is nice and simple to understand. Most basic features are there, at your fingertips. The filters are impressive and since this is brand new software it does not have to rest on legacy coding and is fast and light in terms of resources needed to operate. It is lacking a recorder for repetitive tasks, batch processing, automatic layer naming and a boatload of Photoshop masking features. But that’s not the point. It will suffice for most touch ups, filtering and photo montage. Be careful, when you close a file, the text layers get rasterized… I think it is a definite must have for those of us who know a bit to survive in artwork but who do not want to pay $1,000 for using 1% of a software’s features.

your ads here (468x60) - after 1st post.

Over at the Montreal Mac User Group, I get to do a presentation every month and somehow I’ve become the “software” guy among presenters and I gotta say I love me some good software. The OS is important, and certainly I’m glad I’m on Leopard and not on Vista, but the Mac shareware scene is incredibly good and I thought I’d do 2 posts outlining some of the best software I’ve found. First one is about freewares, next one will be about paid shareware.

ImageWell

If you have to often resize or convert images, ImageWell is a small freeware that will make your life much simpler. A great piece of software, it does exactly what it needs to do, it does it well and doesn’t get in the way. It also starts quickly and doesn’t take a lot of resources. There’s a paid update to it, but the base freeware does everything.

WriteRoom

Do you often have to write long text? If so, you might have my problem where I get distracted by a lot of things on my Mac. New emails come in all the time, RSS feeds are updated, iChat invitations, etc. There’s a lot going on at all time and this is where WriteRoom comes in. This is an extremely simple text editor that has a full screen mode that blocks out everything else. The new version is a paid shareware, but the old 1.0.4 is free. Given the nature of the application, I find that this version does what I need it to do.

Audacity

This one is pretty well known but I thought I’d include it here anyway. Audacity is cross platform audio editor that does a lot of what the bigger (and more expensive) softwares do. It works great on Mac and once you learn how it works, you can use it again on Windows or Linux if you ever need it. There’s a ton a plugins and filters, the audio editor works great and it supports a bunch of file formats.

Paparazzi!

This gem is one of my favorite shareware on Mac but it’ll be especially good if you design or work on websites for a living. Paparazzi! is a small freeware that takes a ’screenshot’ of a website as seen by Safari and saves it in a PNG image. You get the whole page, not just a screenful of it so it’s extremely useful. There’s also a little bookmarklet to make it even more useful. Make sure to drag this link to your link bar if you use the software, it’ll make your life even easier.

Caffeine

Caffeine is a small utility that is especially useful for those of us on laptops. What it does is that it adds a menulet (a little icon to the right of the menu bar) and when you click on it, your Mac will never go to sleep. Your screen won’t dim, it will just keep going until you run out of battery. I use it all the time because I hate it when the screen dims or worse still, goes blank. Small. Useful. Free. That’s good for me.

TextWrangler

This one’s a puzzle to me. First, if you’re a developer, you’ll like TextWrangler. It’s a free text editor from the makers of BBEdit. BBEdit is a great piece of software, but it’s expensive and for some reason I never got around to buying it. One thing that didn’t help was TextWrangler, a free software that does pretty much everything I need. I’ve since switched to TextMate, but there’s no question TextWrangler is quality software.

NeoOffice

OpenOffice is a well known, cross-platform MS Office replacement that works well. NeoOffice is based on Open Office but is done for Mac users. It looks like a Mac application and acts (mostly) like one. With Microsoft Office 2008 getting very mixed reviews, this can be a great alternative if you’re on a budget.

Reboot. As simple as it may sound, rebooting reinitialises everything and makes you restart from a clean slate. (Doesn’t count as a way to speed up).

1. Repair Disk Permissions. Go into Applications > Utilities > and start Disk Utility. Select your hard drive and click on Repair Disk Permissions. Apparently applications you install or run often mingle with what the OS expects as the right permissions for certain key files. Whatever.

2. Unclutter your desktop. Bad habits have a way of appearing as the natural thing to do. Computer architects are often caught up in a logic of their own (less at Apple’s) that makes no provision for the “natural way” of doing things. Isn’t it easy to just save everything to the Desktop and then just link to it say when you’re adding an attachment to an email? Well don’t. Leopard has addressed this by saving in a download folder right off Safari. Spotlight, QuickSilver and others are there to allow you to be sloppy with your files thanks to meta data describing their contents. Move everything out of your Desktop, leave it at your user level (so you don’t have to worry about “Sharing”). The Desktop makes preview items for all these icons lying around. It takes unnecessary time to process, especially at boot up.

3. Remove unnecessary start-up items. Go into System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and make sure you understand what is there and for what purpose. Obviously, if you don’t need it, simply remove it.

4. Clean your hard drive. Make sure you have at least 15% of free space on your hard drive. Find files that appear in more than one place, use whatsize to determine where your bigger files are (or use OmniDiskSweeper). Run Xslimmer if you have an Intel machine and couldn’t careless about PowerPC legacy code in Universal Binary applications. Please note that once you do that, your application will only run on an Intel machine. Consider getting an extra drive for data and backups (and for Time Machine). Run AppFresh, stay current and get rid of unused applications. Clear caches. Be careful and use a utility like Yasu. Accept the defaults, don’t over do it. USER and SYSTEM caches are best kept untouched.

5. Add more RAM. Nothing like maxing out your ram and lowering the slower disk access for memory intensive applications or for running multiple applications at once. Crucial and Kingston are probably the two most popular suppliers offering extensive support for finding out what memory chip will fit your Mac. Crucial has a memory scanner that you can download and install on your Mac. Kingston wants you to tell it what computer you have. About this Mac > More Info > Hardware > Memory will reveal the banks of memory your system has and how they are populated at present. Desktop Macs are pretty easy to upgrade. Laptops are another story and involve removing the battery in most cases. Here’s a good chart for the iMacs. Here is a chart for the PowerBooks and the iBooks. Here the memory chart for the Power Macs Finally here is how to change memory on your MacBook.

5 ½. Run Activity Monitor. Find out who’s on first with this admin graphic interface. Go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor. It will show you how the CPU is running, how saturated your memory is and use it to check out on the processes running in your system. Google is your friend for any strange sounding process. I include this as a speed gainer because it is the best way to troubleshoot an “intuition” or a “feeling” about your computer’s perceived lack of speed.

I’ve been having some problems dealing with emails lately. I’m now up to anywhere from 500-800 emails a day now — on the accounts I check daily only — and that’s been difficult to deal with seing how 80-90% of junk email.

My problem is that I’ve always been hesitant to setup junk mail filtering because I’m always afraid of losing emails. I decided to do something tonight because I simply couldn’t deal with all the mails anymore.

Step 1 was setting up the mail server (postfix on Linux for me) to use some real-time black lists. That step, alone, removed a ton of SPAM for my personal accounts. That was awesome, but of course it’s no good for all the accounts that do not live on my server, including my 3 accounts at work that get a ton and a half of SPAM daily.

I looked around online and someone on a random forum suggested SpamSieve, a Mac OS X software I had tried a few years ago and discarded immediately. The setup is quite easy and the documented suggested training it with 1000 emails, 65% of which are SPAM. A few minutes later I was all done and now I’m waiting to see the results. So far, so good, but I hope I don’t get too many false positive.

In the past 5 hours or so since I started this, I haven’t received a single SPAM that was not either deleted by the server or wasn’t detected by SpamSieve. This is unheard of. Of course, as I was typing that last sentence, one got through.

I always liked the iStat menu item found on the Apple web site Dashboard section. Seeing all these activity gauges reminded me of Flight Simulator (use Flight Gear). But if you’re like me, you don’t often resort to widgets (default “F12″ key) except perhaps for the occasional weather check when you’ve been inside too long, on the computer… So I like the iStat Menus even more now as they can be customized to appear right in the menu bar, at eyes’ length.

Then all hell broke loose. I realized that at least one application was using up to 110% !!! of the CPU, especially at start-up. Aside for the unnecessary wear and tear, that culprit really slowed down resources (memory, CPU and disk access) for everything else. A quick Google search revealed all sorts of Forum truths, some truer than others. I used the Terminal with “top -u” to find out what was hogging all the CPU cycles (q to quit). Alternatively, “ps aux” at the prompt reveals the processes running and their ids.

With that method, “launchCFMA” was found to use all the CPU time. I needed to investigate further as this process manages legacy applications (PowerPC) and bridges the old with the new INTEL Macs. (aside: found this very interesting article if you’re still not convinced Apple is doing the right thing with its OS (inspired from BeOS, that’s how much of a visionary Jean-Louis Gassée was in 1991).)

I then launched “Activity Monitor” (in Applications/Utilities) to isolate the daemon that was ill-behaved. It turned out to be “Microsoft Database Daemon”. Further research revealed that it was used by Entourage and other Microsoft applications to exchange data and especially “Notifications”. I turned everything off as I no longer use these features, especially if they are legacy (4 years ago) and behaving like resource hogs. You go into System Preferences, Accounts and Login to remove start-up applications. You go into the Entourage folder to find Microsoft Office Notifications and in its preferences, you turn it off.

I can’t wait for the new Office release for Mac. Now that promises to be worth some CPU time!

Allow me to go off-topic for a bit.

So that’s what we get for Bill’s last CES Keynote. No product announcement, a few demos or technologies we already know about and a funny video about his last day in the office. I mean, come on Microsoft. Where’s that XBox 360 Ultimate SKU everyone was talking about. How about at least a comment on the ongoing HD format war. What about a shiny new product that I can get interested in ?

Bill is an insanely intelligent guy, very successful, but he’s no Steve Jobs when giving presentations. On the positive side, that presentation gave me the opportunity to test Microsoft’s Silverlight on Mac and it works great. It’s good to know that Microsoft’s ‘Flash Killer‘ at least works well on the platform.

Hey, we got the Zune in Canada. Yawn…. Now Steve, could we please get a canadian iPhone? I’ve been a good boy all year and bought all your products and I swear I’ll continue to do so. Please?

I decided to start the year on target with productivity objectives. I am going to get rid of all Web 2.0 accounts that are simply not adding any value to my online presence. I’ll start with Jaiku. Well it’s not that easy to remove one’s account. I obtained a dreaded 504 Gateway Time-outwhile deleting my account. That’s precisely the point I’m trying to make. Time waster. 504 when dialog fails. Nice thinkgeek t-shirt idea. 

Why would I need a service that cannot get rid of me? Like Woody Allen once said (and I’m paraphrasing you purists (it’s from Annie Hall but Woody got it from Groucho Marx)) why would I be part of an online service that would have me as a member? Just kidding. I like enriching content and that has nothing to do with socializing, that’s the heart of the problem. I think facebook is immature (my ex-coworkers are all there). I dig digg because it’s offbeat.

Why socialize online when I don’t even socialize in real life? Why make this anonymous experience even more shallow?

See how deleting a social network account can be thought provoking? I should create an account in all of them just for the sake of discussing their deletion. It’s simply del.icio.us  Hey come to think of it, I already have an account in the most popular social networks… Oh yeah that was the initial point.

Finally, 2007 is over and the expensive holiday season is behind us. We can now move on to the much more expensive MacWorld season, where Santa Steve showers us with cool, shiny, gotta have ‘em, new products. I have to admit, my chances of not buying anything during that week is pretty low.

As someone who works everyday on a Mac (a MacBook Pro 15″), I’m always looking for new and more efficient ways to manage my work day. Lot’s of tasks to manage, lot’s of email coming in, lot’s of people calling. That’s why MacWorld is so interesting to me. Sure, Steve will give us new products but other 3rd party developers will also do the same.

Leopard was a huge release for developers (in terms of API) and I can’t wait to see what new applications will come out because of it. TextMate, my favorite text editor is scheduled to have its 2.0 release fairly soon, Delicious Library 2.0 is coming any day/week now. OmniFocus 1.0 final is also scheduled to be released monday while OmniGraffle 5.0 is at beta 3 and I’m sure we’ll see many many more in the coming months. Most of these apps will be Leopard-only, a fact that would be surprising if not for the incredible conversion rate of Apple’s OS X releases these last few years. Leopard came out at the end of october, some 3 months ago and we’re already at almost 30% of usage. This is nothing short of amazing to me and it explains why developers are so quick to jump on the new APIs and the new OSes from Apple. This is something you don’t see with new releases of Windows.I’m really excited to see all the cool software we’ll get in 2008.

For now, I’m having a hard time deciding between OmniFocus and Things for my tasks management app. I think I need an app to manage my management of tasks.

How many times have you visited a city thinking where are the hot spots? Oh, sorry I meant WIFI. In any case, here is a quick way of finding hotspots from your hotel room before you go out in the wild. Of course, all precautions should go into effect: a VPN channel to your office, SFTP to any file server and encrypted channels for all your iChat buddies with .mac accounts galore.

Of course I’m the paranoid type when it comes to security and password protection. Not that I own any state secrets but I just like to maintain my privacy. It seems these days, it’s a commodity for organized crime. Hey Computer Associates was hacked!

Pick complicated password. Change them once a month or every time you retrieve your emails in public places. Even then there is so much to discuss. Hey Jonathan that would be a nice discussion to have.