At Work On a Mac

Every month at the local Mac User Group I give demos of cool software and every now and then, I stumble upon a gem that becomes a hit with the crowd (and myself). This is one of them. Skitch is a screenshot app on steroid. It’s easy to use, the interface doesn’t get in the way and and works quite well.

The only big drawback as far as I’m concerned is the fact that you need to create an account on their site to use it. It does come with a benefit: you can host your screenshots for free on their (beta) service. Still, making it optional would have been nice.

In any case, this app is hard to describe. A screenshot app doesn’t quite sound exciting but their video makes a good job of explaining it all.

Software app, Mac, macosx, screenshot, Software

Every so often I stumble upon nice little apps from indie developers that I just have to buy. It’s a compulsive thing. My latest one is Cinch, from Irradiated Software, a small software developer that is best known for SizeUp. If you just thought “Who?” and then “What?” after reading this, you’re not alone.

Cinch is a new app that does something similar than what SizeUp does in that it helps you position windows (lowercase w) on your desktop. Say you want to move a file and you’ve opened 2 different Finder windows to do so. Clinch allows you to simply drag one window to the left of the screen at which point it will auto-resize to take up exactly 50% of the screen. Do the same with the second window and your screen is now split into 2 equally sized Finder windows.

SizeUp, a utility I’ve reviewed here a few months ago does the same thing but works with keyboard shortcuts. Since I know a lot of Mac users are not big fans of keyboard shortcuts galore, I think Cinch as a good chance of getting popular.

At 7$, it’s cheap and works really well. If you need that kind of utility, it’s well worth your 7$.

Software app, application, review, Software

I thought François’ idea of a top 10 list was brilliant so I figured I’d just steal the idea. I won’t do a global top 10 though since it would look a lot like his except for a few places where he’s dead wrong. I mean, you don’t need VLC, right ? Just install Perian. And while Coda is quite nice, I’m still an avid TextMate user and I’ll be until they release version 2.0, sometime this millennium.

Hey, they are taking their time to make a nice product. I mean, it worked well enough for Duke Nukem, right? What?

So no, I won’t create funny category names like “Cause you really want to know what I had for breakfast” (Tweetie 2) or “Works great but I still can’t find a reason to use it” (PathFinder 5.5).

No, I won’t do that. What I will do however is tell you about a few of the apps I found in 2009 as part of my monthly demos for the Montreal Mac User Group.

Snippet.app

If you’re a programmer, I think Snippet.app could be something you’d find a lot of uses for. Nice little app (free demo, 13$ to purchase) with a slick UI that allows you to quickly store and retrieve text snippet. You can assign tags to each snippets for easier retrieval and the app runs as a menulet so it doesn’t get in your way. You even get a global shortcut key to call up the search panel.

Delibar

Delibar is one of those apps I still don’t know how I managed to survive all my life without it. Incredibly slick UI and the app works flawlessly to both search and add to your Delicious bookmarks. At 18$, it’s not cheap, but it’s an incredibly well done app. Heck, even the web site looks delicious.

img2icns

From the folks who brought you Delibar comes img2icns, an app with an incredibly slick UI (noticing a trend here?) and a name with very few vowels. Forget the name though, that little app works great. It allows you to convert any PNG file to Mac OS X icons and vice versa. Simple, elegant and there’s even a free version.

Nik Software plugins

If you’re a photographer, you probably know about Nik Software already. If you’re not, you probably don’t care so in a way, this description is completely useless to just about everyone. Insanely good plugins or Photoshop, Lightroom or Aperture. Not cheap at 300$ for the suite, but how about a 25% off coupon? Use DZISER at checkout to save 25%. You can thank David Ziser I guess for this code. I don’t know the guy, but I love the code.

Photomatix

Another great app for photographers. Photomatix is simply the best app out there to create HDR photos (like this one for example). Highly recommended.

Layers.app

One last one for the road. Layers.app is the kind of app that makes you wonder why nobody had thought of it before. Layers is used to take a screenshot of your screen, but as its name implies, that screenshot is in fact a PSD file with every element on the shot on a separate layer. Brillant. Expensive is another way to put it (25$), but hey, if you’re someone who regularly needs to take screenshots for product demos and stuff, why not.

Or maybe you’re just like me and you buy neat apps for no good reasons other than to support the developers.

Have a great 2010 guys. All five of you.

Bookmark Essentials, Software 2010, apps, bestof, reviews, Software

So we all know and love Spotlight. Ever since it’s appearance in OS X several years ago, it’s been a great way to find files and even to launch applications. As an app launcher, even though it works pretty well, Spotlight has a few shortcomings compared to applications like Launchbar. For one thing, it doesn’t support abbreviations and it can be quite a bit slower to use since it indexes everything.

There is however a few things you can do. First, open the Spotlight preferences in System Preferences and disable everything you don’t care about. I never search for fonts for example, so I always disable that. The key here however is to make sure Applications are at the top of the list.

While you certainly knew about this first tip, you might not know about the second one. Other than filename and content, Spotlight also searches each file’s metadata and one that always exists and is accessible through the Finder is the “Spotlight Comments” field where you can type anything you want.

For the apps you use the most, find their icons in the Finder and type CMD-I to open the Get Info panel. There, you’ll find the Spotlight Comments field. The key here, is to add something unique to make the search fast. I suggest adding “aa” in front for application followed by a few letter. Firefox for example could be aaf. You can then “Cmd-Space” to open spotlight followed by your 3-4 letters abbreviations (“aaf”) followed by enter. The search is almost instant!

This unfortunately doesn’t work with system apps in 10.6 since those are locked when using the Finder. If you have PathFinder, you can actually change them from there.

Productivity macosx, osx, Spotlight, tip, tips, trick

Google recently came up with their own public DNS servers to “speed up the web” even more (see my analysis of their strategy and my initial impressions on my blog here). What they do is they give you a single IP address that’s routed to a Google DNS server near you and they heavily cache all the results. Basically, it should speed up your web browsing.

Of course, Google’s service is not the only one. You can also try the well-known OpenDNS or the quite fast UltraDNS to see which one is better but it can be hard to determine which one is really faster.

The answer is surprisingly easy to find thanks to a free, open source tool from a Google employee (Gotta love those “20% projects”). NameBench is a little tool that will run tests on a random set of sites using public DNS servers and local servers (your ISP, others nearby etc.). It takes about 5 minutes to run and will tell you what DNS servers you should be using.

Quick, Easy and Free. That’s my kind of solution!

Networking, Software dns, macosx, Networking, performance, Software, speed

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, it’s quite obvious a big part of our digital life is moving to the Web. We go from device to device, be it a computer, a PDA, a phone or an ebook reader and as such, data portability is getting increasingly important.

In my case, I’ve been a Mobile Me/.Mac member since 2003 but the service has 1 big issue : it really is an Apple-centric solution (and thus, not great on a non-Apple device) and while it can sync your bookmarks, it still doesn’t support tags to organize them. If you surf even half as much as I do, it’s easy to get hundreds of bookmarks in a few months, most of them unorganized. Who doesn’t have a “Cool Stuff” bookmark folder? Because of this, I’ve decided to split my bookmarks in two. My Safari bookmark bar is being used for those sites I visit everyday and those bookmarks are being synched through Mobile Me but everything else is going to Delicious.

Now Delicious is great, but I love having a native OS X client to manage those web services. For a while I was using the very simple (and quite cheap) “Delish” but it wasn’t all that great. It’s a nice application, but nothing to write home about. For one thing, why would you write home about a Delicious application?

I was very happy lately when I found Delibar, a very nice, well-working, incredibly slick-looking and yes, nice-smelling native OS X client for Delicious. At 18$, it’s not exactly cheap but if you use Delicious in any capacity you owe it to yourself to try this out. There’s a free version that has limited functionalities if you want to try it before buying. That version never expires.

The app has bookmarklets to let you easily add a page to your delicious account and supports a system wide shortcut key to bring up the search panel. You can also see the latest bookmarks from members of your Delicious network.

Greatly recommended.

Software delicious, macosx, osx, review, shareware, Software

I’ve been getting into photography a lot lately (you can see some of my amateur work on my smugmug gallery) and one of the decision I’ve had to take early on was to choose between the annually-updated iPhoto and Apple’s “pro” software Aperture to manage my library. I ended up with Aperture partly because of my desire to use a lot of plugins which Aperture 2 supports very well but the problem with the software is that iPhoto is updated every year and Aperture isn’t. iPhoto can export photos to Flickr and Facebook directly, it can recognize faces of your friends and can map the photos on a map.

To say that I wouldn’t mind having those features around is an understatement. There’s also a lot more I wish Aperture would do, including perhaps native export to some of the popular online sites to host photos (other than of course Flickr). SmugMug would be welcome in my case but there are others. We live in such an interconnected world now with medias being uploaded all the time, it makes sense to have native support for those online destination.

Hopefully we’ll see a new version announced in the new few months.

Productivity

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, I ended up waiting in line all night again this year for the launch of Apple’s iPhone 3Gs in front of Montreal flagship Rogers store. And when I say it wasn’t a surprise for anyone, I do mean it. 4 people that night recognized me from last year.

The 3Gs is much like Mac OS X 10.6, it’s a mostly minor upgrade in this case focusing on a few highlights (Speed and Camera). A lot of people have been wondering if the upgrade is worth it from the original iPhone or from the 3G. After a few days using the phone, I can’t answer for everybody but I can say it was totally worth it for me.

The camera is great and I think that the touch to focus will make its way to pro cameras in the future. That’s a brilliant use of the touch screen and overall, the 3Gs takes very good pictures. It doesn’t have the N95/N96/N97’s camera (5MP+), but the autofocus, automacro and auto whitebalance go a long way in making good pictures.

The phone is also much faster. If you had both a 3G and an iPod Touch, you had probably noticed the Touch was much faster than the 3G and the 3Gs is now faster than both of them. Combined with the excellent (and free) 3.0 OS upgrade, it makes for a very speedy and very responsive phone. 3G games in particular got a big boost and once they start using OpenGL ES 2.0, it’ll be an even bigger difference.

One thing that really surprised me was the speed of the network. Here in Canada we are lucky enough that Rogers actually supports the new 3Gs “7.2Mbits” capability. Using USB tethering, I was able to download Firefox at 544KB/s, a very impressive speed. Given that tethering is free until at least december with a 1GB+ data plan, it’s an awesome feature for us in Canada.

What makes it all worth though is that more and more apps will make use of the better camera, the integrated compass and the voice control (through future APIs I expect to be part of an SDK update). The compass might seem like a useless feature, but look at the Augmented Reality apps on Android phones and you’ll see just how powerful it can be. 3.2 megapixels camera might not seems like a big deal, but a camera that can focus as close as 10CM can be very useful for scanning smaller stuff like barcodes.

Voice control already controls the phone and the iPod (and it certainly isn’t perfect yet — Apple still has some work here) but I can foresee a future where I’ll be able to tell my phone to read me the last received SMS or to control a game using my voice (“attack unit”, “defend base”, etc.)

Overall, much like the 3.0 OS update, it’s what the phone enables in the future that’s the most interesting. The 3.0 OS update will make apps much better because of the thousand new API and the new phone will also do its part with its added power and features.

It’s not a critical update by any mean, but it’s a very sweet phone. If you’re still on the original iPhone, it’s a no brainer update. If you’re on a dumb phone, run, don’t walk.

Productivity

If you are a registered iPhone developer, you can now download the beta version of the OS. The beta was unfortunatly released under NDA, so I cannot yet comment too much on it, but you can watch the full presentation by Scott Forstall (Senior VP iPhone Software) and Greg Joswiak (Senior VP iPhone/iPod Marketing) to get an idea of what’s coming.

As someone who now owns an iPhone, an Android G1 and a Blackberry curve, I can say that I’m really excited about what 3.0 will bring. To me, it really feels like Apple managed to fix 75% of what was clearly missing from the platform. Stuff like Copy/Paste was an obvious flaw, but the “1000 new APIs” that Apple announced will certainly have the biggest impact on the future of the platform. I really believe that applications will be quite a bit better once a few weeks go by and developers have a chance to update their applications.

I must say, I really wasn’t expecting this much and don’t take the (relatively small) amount of new end-user features alone when judging the 3.0 update.

Productivity iphone, opinion

I finally got my copy of iLife 09 today and immediatly set out to install it and test the new features. I do have a problem though. I haven’t created a DVD in ages (I don’ t have kids), I never shot video either (damn it Apple, I want QIK on my iPhone), I’m certainly not a musician and the I’ve had so many problems with the podcasting part of GarageBand that I’ve given up a while ago.

So what am I left with? iPhoto and iWeb. Now, I code web sites for a living so you’ll understand if iWeb is perhaps not for me. I do intend on trying it out though to see how it compares to other simple editor. There’s a real value to these simple to use software and I’m glad Apple took the time to create one.

So, back to photos. I do like taking pictures. I have my Nikon D80 and a few nice lenses to go with it. I’m a good Apple fanboy though and a couple of months back, I switched from iPhoto 08 to Aperture 2.1 because I wanted a little bit more power and, well, Apple said it was better.

And now I’m kinda sad. I want to use and like iPhoto 09, but my iPhoto library is empty and my 200$ copy of Aperture is laughing at me. I would love to have the new Places and Faces functions. I would love the Flickr and Facebook integration. So are we doomed? Well, maybe not. There’s a rumor out there that a new version of Aperture (3.0?) could be released by early summer.

I’ll have a full review of iLife 09 in the coming weeks.

Software ilife, rumor, Software