Recently, I had to produce a quick logo that would scale and adapt to all sorts of applications and resolutions. I know I’m not a logo designer (check out logoholic) but that’s besides the point as this was just a way to illustrate the gist of a future identity for a start-up. When it gets a budget, it will be done properly. No matter what, I knew not to open my pixel inspired, raster king software a.k.a. Pixelmator that can now export to Flickr, Facebook and Picasa right from the menu—by the way… No this was a job for vector man.
The process made me realise how little alternatives there are on the Mac for such endeavour. Sure you can get the almighty Abobe Illustrator but hardly a candidate for amateur exploration… Enters X11, open source vector initiative—inkscape. Just outstanding in power as long as you have enabled the X11 option really a xQuartz environment (since 10.5 release) to your OSX and are able to call up this Unix level graphic/client-server environment.
Another alternative, fairly priced at +/- $70 is Vector Designer. That’s the one I ended up using as I preferred the simplicity of its interface. While my logo might not win any awards, it does not crack or pixellate when it is stretched for impact or shrunk for business cards! ADDED: LogoDesign Studio Pro.
Search engine optimisation is a science— it requires a lot of work, thinking and… proper tools! I am impressed with the level of detail in SEO PowerSuite (LinkAssistant, Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass and WebSite Auditor). The free version is really a demo to convince you to buy it for $99 (Euros over here). You will find SEO SpyGlass very useful in analysing competition for your web site. I like SpyGlass’ suggestion of analysing three competitors and comparing reports to see how they succeeded in ranking better than you. There are hundreds of factors (page rank, page load time, keywords, titles, back links, location, HTML validity, content refresh rate, sitemap and robot files, etc.) contributing to top result indexing. SEO Engine Optimisation will certainly provide a good starting point to improve the most meaningful factors.
What if your Time Machine died on you? What if you were looking for a faster way to restore your hard disk or deploy a configuration over the network? There is DeployStudio for that. Very useful utility for system admins with a Mac attitude. It can be configured over as a server running on your network but you will most likely appreciate having it in the following configuration—as an external drive connected via USB2 or Firewire, ready to restore any disk even those with triple partitions (OSX, Linux, Windows). Roll over Time Machine.
Gamers rejoice, you will be able to have a more fluid experience of Team Fortress 2. Apple has just released a Snow Leopard Graphic Update to solve issues with TF2, Portal, Aperture 3 and StarCraft II. 
Also remember that you can always go to your System Preferences pane, click on Software Update and have a look at Installed Software to see how current you are…
It’s been a while since I contributed to this Mac blog. Summer is ending—it’s time to get back to work. There are many alternatives to capturing your screen’s content—Quicktime, SnapZ and others—but none to rival ifunia when it comes to downloading video from YouTube. You simply add a url and voilà! It can handle multiple urls and is a free application. Enjoy.
