Review – BeeDocs Timeline

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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You can listen to the above review on The Mac ReviewCast Episode 139.

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Another Excellent Update for 1Password

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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.

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Christmas Card List Geekery

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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.

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Once that was done, I made a smart group that included a search for Holiday Card.

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Finally, I set it up to print on Avery labels and Christmas was saved.

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iStat pro 4.5 Goes Public

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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

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Apple Releases the Iron Grip on iPhone Ringtones

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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.

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Review – Amadeus Pro

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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