At Work On a Mac

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

Jonathan Grenier 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.

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

I had to migrate my data and applications to a brand new MacBook Pro a while ago. It made me realize how essential some of these applications are to a traveling new media person who loves to be able to be productive with technology and who does not necessarily have a pocket geek to bring along on all these trips.

Here is a compilation of my must-haves for 2010. Let’s do it in in a countdown fashion so you’ll finish reading with the best applications in mind. I also throw in an attempt at David Letterman’s presentation format to make it more entertaining.

Here are the top 10 reasons for owning these best apps or online services.

10. Because not everyone understands limitless mailboxes and huge presentations are so much more appealing. There is YouSendIt for that.

9. Because things that move on your screen are people too. They need to be saved. Why is it so easy to capture stills natively? Multimedia, video, motion and animation. YouTube anyone? Are all part of taking the office on the road without a techie.
SnapZ Pro X provides a perfect remedy to an inherent system discrepancy.

8. A Swiss knife equivalent for Web site programming? You never know when you will need to edit HTML, PHP, CSS. You better have CODA with you then, even if you know.

7. Because files need to be saved, shared, exchanged and edited somewhere away from home (replace home by office as they have become synonyms in this day and age). Transmit is the best FTP client there is for the Mac.

6. Because picture editing, morphing, blending, adding and retouching all rhyme, we need Pixelmator.

5. Because there is never enough video codecs, alternatives and options. Thank the community for VLC.

4. Because the more experience you gain, the more contacts you gather. Contactizer Pro offers the best price-quality ratio in the contact management category.

3. Because data has a tendency to get lost. Invest in Time Capsule.

2. Because The Office is a TV Series you cannot replace with an Open one. Yes you need Microsoft Office no matter what you have heard, there is simply no replacement for this ubiquitous software suite. It is so well integrated that you often think that Word is Excel without a grid. Or is it the reverse? Good luck to OpenOffice.org nonetheless.

1. Because Google is a monopoly that works.
Google Docs, Google Search, Google Mail, Google Wave, etc.

But, please Google, invest in user interface design, user-friendliness, user-experience, and style in 2010. Design? What’s that? It’s about all qualities that have more to do with function than engineers think and make functionalities so much more attractive and enjoyable. The quintessential difference between PC and Mac mentalities? Google, eat some Cocoa, Quartz and Aqua. The text based interface has outlived its purpose.

0. Because you always need more than 10 applications to do anything whilst away from the office and that a countdown hopefully goes to zero. There are Keynote (iWork), iChat, Skype, Eyebeam iTunes, and, and, and..

I wish you a very productive 2010 and good health!

François Reeves Productivity 10 top apps applications

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.

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

Intro
I just finished installing Parallels 5.0 on my old faithful iMac because I need to install State from xtranormal (ODPCI: obligatory divulgation of potential conflict of interest, I work for them ). Since this ol’ thing (3 years) is running XP and that I haven’t had any reason for using Windows for a while (using IKEA’s kitchen software was the “oldest” motivation I can recall), I was 54 Windows updates behind. Add to this ordeal the conversion of my previous Parallels virtual machine install (circa 3.0) and the new State install and you will understand why OS X is a must have and that there should never be a reason to go back once you go Mac.

Development
Well it is just amazing. In a nutshell, this preferred approach to running Boot Camp, had always been plagued by speed issues. Not anymore. While I have not had time to give it an extensive run for its money, I notice a huge difference in Windows start-up, program call up and reactiveness as a whole. Everything has been simplified. It is just seamless and blends perfectly with OS X. It now supports dual monitors. It has an iPhone free application to run virtual machines remotely from the palm of your hand.

Coherence or the ability to blend Windows with OS X was just taken to another level with a “Crystal” mode option that makes the few remaining boundaries disappear. Your are literally running Windows in OS X. If that wasn’t made clear before, this is the utmost advantage over running Windows in a Boot Camp.

Conclusion
I highly recommend Parallels for people wishing to carry Windows (it supports Windows 7) around for the few remaining instances whereby you would be required to run a native PC application on your Mac.

François Reeves Productivity

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!

Jonathan Grenier 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.

Jonathan Grenier Software delicious, macosx, osx, review, shareware, Software

Well, finally got an iPhone. As always, I will extract every Yottabytes out of it. For a start, nobody should leave home without a SIP account and a VoIP Softphone. It just does not make sense to be victimized by roaming and long distance charges on any given business trip.

I recently installed Acrobits’ Softphone (a Prague based company) and it really delivers the goods.

The interface is intuitive (like most iPhone Apps, what an OS!) and it installs in a jiffy. I just joined their Beta testing group and will have a sneak preview at upcoming features. When it comes to VoIP, we never have enough features and options.

First, aside from the obvious advantage of extracting calls out of one’s data plan with a WiFi connection, there is also a conversation record feature and push notification. You can put yourself and the other party on separate audio tracks on the .wav saved file. You can access your conversations through Safari and Bonjour by specifying the listening port and allowing web access in the application’s settings.

On top of that, there is a keep alive function that allows you to close the application and receive calls nonetheless. Finally, you can set up multiple SIP accounts. Can’t wait to be on the road again, working off a cyber café’s WiFi aroma. I learned that Apple may soon lift the ban on softphones’ ability to access 3G networks. That would be awesome, carrying everywhere multiple phone lines at all times on one device in uninterrupted bliss (unless your parking space is three floors down).

And, I also installed what I think is a glimpse at the future—Ustream or the individual as a live witness or participant. Broadcast yourself. It’s far from being perfect but portability and instantaneity overshadows the set backs. You create an account and you broadcast live from your iPhone. Hey James, time to update Q.

François Reeves Productivity

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.

Jonathan Grenier 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.

Jonathan Grenier Productivity