Gearlive has been posting pictures of their purported 1.1.3 updated iPhone. So many people have been calling it fake that they posted a video yesterday that looks very impressive. If it is a fake, it is a very convincing one. Otherwise, I am looking forward to 1.1.3. The video demonstrates moveable icons, Safari bookmarks turned into icons (yay Google Reader button!) and a quasi-GPS system using cell tower triangulation. Check it out.
Like a lot of Mac users, I find myself using a Windows box at work. My law firm has invested a lot of money into our network and some Windows specific software (not to mention years of data) which means I am often stuck on a windows machine. That doesn’t mean you have to leave the OS X experience at home though. There are some good Windows applications that Aquafy the Windows user interface. Now granted these don’t give you the full OS X experience, they do at least make things a little nicer. Kind of like giving a Yugo a new shiny red paint job with flames on the side.
Anyway, I actually licensed one called Stardock before I even bought my Mac. That was one of the things that pushed me over the edge. I figured if I was emulating a Mac, why didn’t I just buy one? Now that I spend so much time in OS X, (I generally work on my laptop in the office these days) it is nice to have all the buttons in the same places when I do find myself working on the PC. I recently discovered another way to Aquafy your PC with FlyaKite OSX. This is free but I haven’t tried it on my work PC yet. I’m much less adventurous with that machine. If anyone does give it a try, drop me a note and we’ll get a post up.
I’ve already decided that when the office machine dies, I’m going to put an iMac in there and run my windows programs through parallels or boot camp if necessary, but for the time being, these applications will have to do.
Continuing my tour of favorite MenuBar applications, I thought I’d write a bit about iSlayer’s excellent iStat menus. This application creates a preference pane that allows you to put a variety of tools in your menubar. It allows you to keep on top of memory, drive space, processors, fans, and other geeky details.
As you can see, iStat is loaded with options and can quickly hog up your Menubar. For giggles I turned them all on and filled half of the Menubar on my 17″ widescreen MacBook Pro. Oops.
Trying to bring order back to chaos I reset the key stats to give vertical bars and I am good to go. It takes a minimum of space but provides all the information I need.
It’s funny how buying Macs becomes contagious. Since I bought mine, several friends and family have come into the fold. A few months ago, my sister told me she intended to buy a MacBook for each of her college age children. She enlisted me to help her. I was tasked with purchasing and setting them up so they could hit the ground running on Christmas morning. Now the pressure was on with this assignment because my brother in law is a PC wizard. There aren’t many things that can go wrong with a PC that Dr. Tom can’t sort out. Here is a guy that take’s PC’s apart when he is bored. So here I am with my sister “corrupting” his own children on Macs. It would be like General Lee’s kids going off to fight for General Sherman.
Anyway, I braved the crowd and went to the Apple store the day after Thanksgiving and took advantage of Apple’s one day $100 off deal for the MacBooks. I also bought a family pack of iWork (Reviews - Pages, Numbers, Keynote) and the AppleCare warranty for both machines. Finally I bought a Microsoft Office Student pack. This last bit wasn’t really that necessary but Microsoft had an incredible deal on Black Friday allowing me to get the program for $50 with a free upgrade to Office 2008. If it had not been for that deal, I would set them up with iWork and NeoOffice.
So I got these shiny white machines home and had a great deal of fun setting them up. In addition to iWork and Office I installed several programs built around the college budget … meaning free or darn near free.
For web browsing I set them up with Safari and Firefox. Safari got Inquisitor. Safari without Inquisitor is like a Ferrari with no gas. I also installed Vienna, a great RSS reader but lately I’ve been liking Google Reader so much that I set that up for them as well.
For Mail I set them up with mail.app and the Mail Act-On plugin. Read the Review Here.
Jumpcut
This is my favorite free MenuBar application. Easy to use and really helpful to anyone that writes. Read the review.
OmniOutliner
I got them student licenses for OmniOutliner which only cost $25. I really wish Omni had been around back when I was in college.
They both have big DVD collections and iPods. This was a no brainer. On the subject of video support, Flip4Mac and Perian are almost mandatory for anybody that wants to watch web video.
ImageWell
This is a great little app for making quick adjustments or watermarks on graphics files
CarbonCopyCloner
Bootable backup on a budget.
1Password
This is another application on my Mac that I just couldn’t live without. If you haven’t heard of it, 1Password allows you to track all sorts of passwords, web logins, and other data you want to keep secret. Read the review here.
A great, free all purpose instant message client.
iGTD
I actually prefer OmniFocus for task management but we were on a budget and iGTD has more then enough horsepower for college. Read the review here.
It is inevitable that I will be doing tech support on these machines so I installed Disk Inventory X, iStat, and MainMenu. I’ll be installing Onyx when they get the Leopard compatibility sorted out.
In addition to the above applications, I also set up their iLife applications by loading the address book with my nice relatives and a few crazy ones. I left the fruitcake relatives out. I set up a few iPhoto events and even set up their iCal calendars.
I also put a folder in their dock with some choice screencasts from MacSparky and a few from Don McAllister to get them started. If they show enough interest, I’ll probably end up buying them memberships from Don’s website for their birthdays.
I also picked widgets and wallpapers specific to their personalities. If you haven’t already, check out interfacelift.com for just about any type wallpaper you can think of. It was a blast setting the computers up for them so when they unwrapped them Christmas morning they simply opened the lid and found them ready to go. I’m happy to report that less than one week after Christmas, they are both already confirmed switchers. I’ve already had a few iChat screensharing sessions with them to fix a few hiccups and just love how easy it is to help them out.
So what are you “Must Have” applications on a new Mac?
BeeDocs released an update to Timeline now putting it at version 2.01. The update includes some Leopard updates and adds high resolution printing. You can download it here. Don’t forget the “MACSPARKY” code still gets you 15% off through January.
I have been using NewsGator for about a year. It syncs with NetNewsWire and it has an excellent iPhone application. About a month ago I started using Google Reader to figure it out if I was missing out on anything. After a month, I’m sticking with Google Reader.
There are a few reasons for this decision. As nice as NetNewsWire is, I wasn’t really using its additional features. Having a native news reading application really wasn’t making that much of a difference for me. Furthermore, the NewsGator iPhone interface doesn’t allow you to go back and read “clipped” articles unless you leave them “unread” which then makes you reader list cluttery.
Google Reader solves these problems and works well with the way I do things. I usually find myself going through and tagging articles on my iPhone and actually reading interesting ones on my Mac. What is your favorite reader?
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays friends. I hope all the MacSparky readers have a happy and safe holiday and Santa places plenty of Apple toys under your tree. Above was our family Christmas card this year which was actually my wife’s idea (no, really!). I’ll do a post soon explaining how I did it but for now go back to your eggnog and loved ones.
I just discovered this little donationware app called Warp that allows you to change spaces simply by hovering the mouse on the edge of the screen. I’m finding it really useful and so far no “false-postives”, meaning no unexpected screen changes. Check it out.
This week I’m reviewing a timeline program. Now I know right now a lot of people are rolling their eyes but I love timelines. I actually get excited about them. I think I like timelines because they are visual and a lot of times you see relationships and ideas on a timeline that don’t jump out at you any other way. Until recently I always made timelines using brute force and even on occasion (Dare I say it?) graph paper and a pencil! This changed when a reader and friend turned me onto an excellent application for OS X called, Timeline published by Bee Docs.
Timeline is a simple little application that does nothing but make quick, jaw-dropping timelines. My review is of version 2.0 that just recently was released. When you first load up Timeline, it presents a simple interface that allows you to pick a theme (I like gradient style “Pleather” theme) and a data source which can be any one of several applications or your own custom data set. Setting up a new Timeline is that simple.
Choosing the custom option allows you set up your own timeline that can cover the past 10,000 years or the past 10 minutes. Each entry is made by simply hitting the little “plus” sign and filling in your data. The data can include much more than the obligatory name and date fields. It also supports date ranges, description, photos, and links. This gives you the ability to easily create rich timelines with little work. One of my favorite parts of this is how the program makes room for every entry. Before Timeline, I always found it tedious when I decided to add an event to a timeline and ended up having to scooch everything over to to make it fit.
As an example I prepared a timeline for a client on a dispute I’m involved with where I included images of key contracts and letters throughout a transaction. It took me all of about ten minutes to prepare and looked very professional. Even more importantly, it was critical in conveying important information. Following the meeting I emailed a PDF of the timeline (accomplished with one click in Timeline) and the client and I still refer to it in our phone conversations.
If you don’t want to make a custom data set, Timeline will pull its data out of your iLife applications as well as a few others. Timeline even found Skitch on my machine as a source of timeline data. Using the iLife integration I made a timeline of my most recently played iTunes songs, birthdays from my address book, and photos from iPhoto. I was able to incorporate photographs and links with almost no effort.
The software developer, Adam Behringer, is a fellow Mac enthusiast with whom I’ve been trading email. Adam explained he turned software developer when Apple released OS X. He has now released version 2.0 which adds all the picture and link goodness I descried above. Adam explained the vision for Timeline has always been to create an application where the Timeline can be generated as fast as the entries are discussed and he has succeeded brilliantly.
This application would be useful for more people than geeky lawyers though. I can see this being used in education, business, marketing, and anything else that requires either future planning or summarizing past events. You can download a trial of Timeline at www.beedocuments.com. There is also a very nice (and short) video demonstration. A full license will cost you $40. However, the developer has generously given a discount code for MacSparky readers. If you type the code MACSPARKY at checkout, you will get 15% off. This discount is good through the end of January 2008.
——-
You can listen to the above review on The Mac ReviewCast Episode 139.
So my wife took the girls to get their picture with Santa and, as she was going to pick their picture, she discovered Santa uses a Mac!
Why am I not surprised? I bet he also uses Quicksilver.
One of my favorite blogs, Hawkwings, discovered some excellent (and free) holiday stationary from a generous German Mac guy. Check it out.
Scott Bourne over at The Apple Phone Show is one heck of a photographer. He has been dribbling out some great Alaska pictures over the past few months and recently tied them all into a neat little package. If you are looking for some nice iPhone wallpaper, check it out.
Technorati Tags:
iphone, MacSparky, applephoneshow
The guys over at Agile Web Solutions seem busier than Santa’s elves lately. They just released version 2.5.7 of 1Password which makes several substantial improvements. In case you are unfamiliar with 1Password, it keeps track of all of your secret data and web login information (among other things) simply and painlessly. I reviewed it awhile back and it has quickly become essential in my Mac bag of tricks.
This new version provides full Leopard support for all of the major browsers: Safari, WebKit, Firefox, Flock, Omniweb, DEVONagent, Camino, and NetNewsWire. It also now supports DEVONagent 2.3.
My favorite new feature is the new Wallet formats including email accounts, instant messengers, FTP, .Mac, Amazon S3, ISP, passport, driver license, hunting license (Yes … Hunting License!), AirPort Extreme, bank accounts, and MySQL database information. It also sports a new backup system and a much expanded search feature.
1Password also exports a nifty encrypted bookmark to my iPhone that puts all this information in my pocket. You can check it all out at 1Password.com.
OS X 10.5 Leopard made a lot of improvements to Apple’s ubiquitous PDF and Image manipulation application, Preview. This screencast covers several of my favorite features and tips.
You can Download it Directly Right Here
or better yet subscribe in the iTunes store
In addition to trying to finish my next screencast, I’ve been helping my wife get our Christmas cards done. One such task has been getting the address list together. For this I generally use Address Book. This year my wife had a word table with some new addresses and friends for inclusion on “the list.” In order to make getting this data into AddressBook, I used Pages to convert the table to text and then I emailed the the list to myself in the body of an email. I then used Mail.App’s quick entry to add them into the AddressBook database.
I then simply went through and added an entry for “Holiday Card” on all of our friends and family.
Once that was done, I made a smart group that included a search for Holiday Card.
Finally, I set it up to print on Avery labels and Christmas was saved.
I install iStat pro on every Mac I spend any time on (iStat Menu is a must have as well). Today iSlayer released version 4.5 of perhaps the best techy widget ever. This new version makes several improvements listed below straight from iSlayer. My favorite is already the little activity monitor button. A close second, however, is the ability to open a drive in the finder from its icon in iStat pro.
The “official” list of changes . . .
Updated network section with new details & controls for PPP/PPPoE connections
Improved PPC temperature and fan support
Improved Intel temperature support
Improved S.M.A.R.T. drive temperature monitoring
Fixed bugs with battery section and 10.5
Clicking on a disc icon will now open the drive in finder
New keyboard shortcuts (”g” - Update external IP, 1-8 - Change skin color)
Added button to launch Activity Monitor
Other various bug fixes
Various UI tweaks
I am very happy to report Apple has made importing ringtones to iTunes a much simpler (and less restrictive) affair. You can now export song snippets from iTunes or custom build ringtones right in GarageBand. This is great news for me since I do a lot of my own music and can think of nothing more narcissistic then waking up to my own composition.
I’m also thinking it would be fun to use some of the sound effects to make ringtones. I can think of one particular person who is just begging for a screaming monkeys ringtone on my phone.
I was going to write up a detailed explanation about how to do it but discovered this morning that lifehacker beat me to it.
This new system doesn’t seem to help our Windows brethren but I doubt it will be long before there is a similar feature on that “other” operating system.
Before I went to lawschool, I used to to pay the bills playing my saxophone. At the time, I was pretty knowledgeable about recording technology. Now if you fast forward 20 years, I’ve been reduced to a complete novice. An eager learner perhaps, but still a novice. Up until very recently I did all of my audio recording on my mac using Soundtrack. Don’t get me wrong. Soundtrack is a brilliant bit of code. But it is also very expensive and for most applications, extraordinary overkill on the level of smashing a walnut with a pile driver.
With this in mind, I’ve been playing with Amadeus Pro. This program really is a breath of fresh air for someone like me who generally only needs a simple audio recording and editing program. Behind the simple interface, however, Amadeus has some powerful editing tools, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The interface in Amadeus Pro is simple. You’ve got a waveform and a timeline with a few self explanatory buttons like “Record” and “Stop”. It also has buttons to add, remove, or split tracks. It took me longer to plug my microphone in than it did to figure out how to start recording in Amadeus Pro.
Once you’ve made your recording, Amadeus provides a waveform that you can select and manipulate. This is the part where the simple interface conceals quite a bit of power. Selecting a portion of the recording I can apply several different filters that let me do things like removing pops and hisses. I can also normalize, change pitch, apply stereo effects, fade, and several other helpful filters.
You can also insert markers to your recordering either manually or automatically. The markers can then be used to split the recording into separate audio files. I can envision a really nice workflow where you would record your vinyl into Amadeus Pro and then have Amadeus remove those pops and hisses and then split the album into separate tracks before export. I, unfortunately, got rid of my vinyl records long before these new fangled toys came about so I wasn’t able to put it in practice.
Amadeus Pro reads and writes AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless, MP3, MPEG 4, WAV and just about every audio file type I could ever imagine plus a few I’ve never heard of. Does anyone use the Ogg Vorbis file format? It sounds to me like something you might feed a hobbit but it is actually an open source replacement for MP3. Regardless, Amadeus can read and write it.
Amadeus Pro also does batch processing. One of my music recordings bounced a series of AIF files out of logic onto my desktop. I wanted to quickly get them into a smaller size format and I simply dropped the lot of them in Amadeus’ batch processor. You can do a lot more than just change formatting in it too. You can also apply some filters and tag the files.
There is also a tab called “Analyze” that gives a variety of audio spectrum tools. Essentially, these tools give you a visual representation of the sound. If you are skilled at using them, they can be really helpful.
Amadeus Pro is a powerful yet simple recording application with enough muscle under the hood to take care of most recording needs. It seems that the usual price for admission for recording applications is about $100. Amadeus Pro only costs $40. I was unable to find anything else with this rich of a feature set at the same price point. You can download it from the developer at Hairersoft.com.
Technorati Tags:
MacSparky, amadeus pro
Today Apple released a patch to update Quicktime. The update closes that security gap that has had everyone’s panties in a bunch. Once again, I pressed that “update” button like an Apple lemming. Once again, nothing blew up.
Recent Comments