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

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 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

No comment really. 5,000 more Macs infected by a wicked Trojan installed during the activation of cracked Photoshop downloaded through BitTorrent streams.

The new Mac Trojan variant OSX.Trojan.iSerices.B, detected last Thursday, is found in the crack application bundled with copies of Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Mac. While the actual Adobe Photoshop installer is bug-free, the Trojan embeds itself into a crack application that serializes the program, Intego said. After downloading the pirated Photoshop, the crack application extracts an executable from its data, then installs a backdoor in a file directory, which is not deleted when the computer reboots. If the user runs the crack application again, the Trojan creates another executable with a different name, making the malware more difficult to trace and safely remove.

It might be time to install Avast if you’re hanging around nasty sites. There’s a huge difference between anti-virus and anti-malware. There’s not a lot of descriptive notes on Avast’s effeciency with new threats of the Trojan category. Give it a try and if it slows you’re system down too much, start acting defensively with safe behaviour (no visit to illicit sites, no clicking on attachments from strangers, no downloading of strange PDFs or software, no execution of jpegs and mpegs with browsing software, change root password every month, no getting your emails from public places without changing your user passwords afterwards).

What you might also do is create a web browsing user without administrative privileges, disable Javascript, use Firefox (especially good at phishing detection).

Security, Software

I have an iMac running Parallels with Windows XP for various reasons, mostly because at the time, I couldn’t wait for Boot Camp and Parallels had beaten Apple to installing Windows on a Mac. Why Windows? I sometimes need to verify compatibility issues for business presentations, I tried and used some financial software that will only work in Windows and, mostly, I do not want to lose my Windows touch even though I have distanced myself over the years from that environment and way of thinking the user space. Parallels 4.0 would warrant its own review. Coherence, the ability to run Windows applications under Mac OS X and the possibility to run simultaneous Linux distributions, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 on virtual desktops makes this product amazing.

After hearing, reading and experiencing horror stories, I skipped Vista altogether, like a lot of people preferring XP over Vista any day. Since I read only good things about Microsoft’s Windows 7 and that I wanted to experiment with Boot Camp’s performance over Parallels, I decided to install the Windows 7 Beta on one of my MacBooks.

Because this is a blog, I’ll make an effort to keep it short and spare you an unpleasant downloading experience. It made me realize how different Microsoft and Apple were. I am sure both companies employ very bright engineers but, Microsoft seems to always manage to leave out the user in its design strategy. Downloading the Beta is a testimonial to that.

What if I were not new to Beta testing?

What does that have to do with anything? Microsoft wants to make sure you have a Windows Live sign on. I’m downloading a Beta, willing to invest my time to test it out. I would have giving you a false email just to make sure I miss an activation code? Also, it would be nice to always know how many steps are involved in any online transaction ahead of its completion, especially when superflous steps are added.

Now that’s a good one. I’m using Hotmail, a Microsoft product that cannot recognize an email stemming from— Microsoft. Attachments, pictures and links in the message have been blocked to protect me. Considerate, considering.

You don’t really need the product key for the install. Just hit return when you get to it. Microsoft, can you rethink this whole Product Key thing from scratch, putting yourself in the user’s seat? For future reference, it’s an annoyance, we always have to reinstall the system and end up losing the key. It’s a pain to enter even when we have it. Find another way. Diminish the unpleasant experiences of contact points with your brand and your products. Think different to paraphrase a famous Apple adage.

Yikes, go figure. In Microsoft I trust, in Akamai I… oh well, do I have a choice?

Microsoft is using a JAVA applet to manage the download, tsk, tsk. Thank you Sun. (couldn’t resist that one )

Now for some positive aspects of Windows 7. It installed relatively quickly, far from the over 2 hours I had spent installing XP and its updates and Parallels. It feels funny to see my MacBook wearing Windows. The Intel processor, Boot Camp, FreeBSD and Mac OS X transforms the Mac into a unique development machine. I like it a lot.

It boots very fast, finally (Apple take notes). To boot off Windows and to run Boot Camp at start-up, hold the “alt or option” key. Windows 7 looks very promising and has an intuitive feel to it. I like the way it manages networks. I don’t like another long key we have to write down for future pairing of computers with this local network. Email anyone?

I will now proceed to install software and see how it runs. As I said, I like the performance, the look and feel and the speedy start-up. The interface is well done and flowing. I’ll keep you posted when I really try it out.

Productivity, Software

If you are a Web developer or you’ve ever tried sending an email to a list of people, you know it can be quite difficult to pull off. It’s annoying because you have to make sure your message will be readable on a multitude of email clients, that it won’t be considered SPAM and that accents (if you’re writing in a language that uses them) will work. Character encoding is always such a troublesome thing to manage.

MaxBulk Mailer Pro version 6 is a piece of software that works on both Mac OS X and Windows that will help you send such an email. The software is quite powerful— it gives you guidance to make sure your mail is not considered SPAM, it can import a list of recipients from a multitude of sources (including a remote database system, a text file, CSV file, etc.) and it will work with whatever SMTP server you want (you can configure this when sending the mail). The software allows you to save lists of contact for future reuse and you can export that list to a text file if you’d like to move the list to another database.

The Pro version of the software also allows you to send mail attachments. Considering the small price difference, it can be worth it to go for the Pro version. The normal edition retails for $49 US while the Pro is $10 more at $59.

All’s not perfect though. The interface to write the email itself could use an overhaul. It’s not wysiwyg at all, it’s a simple text box where you paste whatever you want to send. If you are sending an HTML email, you have to type the HTML tags yourself. During our tests, we had some difficulties with text/html combo emails which for some reason Apple Mail wasn’t too keen on. It worked on a second test however…

While it’s not perfect by any means, it is quite a nice little piece of software and seems to work pretty well. The “new”-ish version 6.0 is a nice upgrade if you had version 5 before. Other than new features, the interface has been revamped a bit. Clearly, the next step for MaxBulk Mailer is to improve on the text editing widget since the rest of the package feels polished and feature complete.

You can try a free 30 days demo on their web site if you’d like to see how it works.

Software mail, review, Software

Google made a splash in 2008 when it released its new browser “Chrome”. Part of the reason why Chrome made a good first impression is that the browser is really fast and has good compatibility with Web sites in general. That’s all fine, but unfortunately Chrome is still not available for Mac. All hope is not lost though. What you may or may not know is that Chrome is based on Webkit, Apple’s HTML rendering framework used in a little application known as Safari.

When Apple first released Safari in 2003 it decided to use the open source HTML engine from the KDE project (a Linux desktop environment) as its basis. Since it’s open source, Apple had to keep it open source so what they did is that they launched an open source project of their own called WebKit.

Every now and then (mostly at major OS releases), Apple releases a new version of Safari and claims it’s “faster, more compatible,…” . If you’d like to get these benefits right now, you can do so easily by using a nightly build of Webkit. Simply visit the site and download the latest version. It won’t impact your installation of Safari so you’ll be able to go back to the “stable” version anytime you want. Webkit will use the same bookmarks as Safari and those will be synched through MobileMe if you are using that service. The transition back and forth between WebKit and Safari is transparent.

Enjoy the speed increase. While the software is technically “not stable”, I’ve never had a problem with it so you’re not taking a big risk.

Software apple, free, open source, Software