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

Software app, application, review, Software

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

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