Review – Inspiration 8

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You can hear this review on the MacReviewCast Episode 134. This week I thought I would take a look at an excellent software package my daughter has been using on her iMac, Inspiration 8 from Inspiration Software.

When school started this fall, my 6th grade daughter, Sam, came home bragging about this program she was using at school that sounded a lot like a kid friendly mindmap program.  Now I know you must be thinking, how could an 11 year old be excited about such a thing but, indeed, the kids are.  That is because the folks at Inspiration have figured out a way to make these tools fun and easy to work with.


Inspiration has both outline and diagram views that allow the kids to work in a linear or more free-form basis.  It is loaded with education friendly templates.  Nevermind the obligatory organization chart: This thing has important stuff like history reports and science projects.  The built in dictionary and thesauras even help them step up thier writing skills.

It helps you gather, sort, and analyze information and then organize it for presentation or report.  Man do I wish I learned those skills when I was 11.


The application is useful for planning and organizational skills, critical thinking, communicating clearly, and analytical skills.  If the kids have fun while they do it, they won’t have any idea just how much good it is doing them.  You’ve heard enough from me though.  I have a guest reviewer who wants to share her thoughts on the program.
Allow me to introduce Samantha Sparks
****Samantha
Hi, my name is Samantha and I am doing my review on a program called Inspiration 8.  It was released in February of this year. You can build diagrams, graphic organizers, and concept maps. You can add pictures and arrows. It features 65 templates to get you started. You can also add media. 
I found out about it at school when we had to do a family tree on it. It was pretty easy once you know about two of the main buttons. I recommend using rapid-fire which is a button for brainstorming. It is a lot faster. Overall the program is very easy to catch onto.
I use it still for school purposes. I just recently did a report that required a family tree. My Social Studies teacher gave us a handout of a template of the tree. I started and then realized that I could make it a lot easier and better on Inspiration. I have the ability to start it at school in lab and import my unfinished copy onto my thumb-drive. I can then just finish it at home. It makes it a lot easier. 
As I said before, it comes with a lot of templates already so I usually pick one of those. You can make bubbles different shapes, colors, and sizes. You can also insert hyperlinks. It can be on a mac or a PC. The program overall just is so easy and it makes  projects look quite nice. 
The one thing that I don’t quite like the fact that when insert a new bubble, the arrow automatically shows up with two points on each end. You can’t just set a setting  for the arrows and just apply it to them all. I have to manually highlight each arrow and change them. 
I would highly recommend this program to people who make diagrams or concept maps a lot. You can do something very similar to this on word but I think it is worth it to buy and use this one instead.
*****David
A license for Inspiration will cost $69.  I know that is pretty high but teaching my daughter the skills this program offers makes it a bargain in my book.

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Apple Mail Scripts 2.8

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As I continue to fumble my way through Applescript, I stumbled upon Apple’s own Mail script package that has several nice applications.
Apple explains them as follows:
– Add Addresses (Mail): Add addresses found in the selected messages (in the header fields “From”, “To”, “Cc”, and “Bcc”) to the Address Book. This is much more flexible than the “Add Sender to Address Book” available in Mail and provides a convenient way for creating mailing lists.
– Archive Messages (Mail): Move messages from the selected mailbox(es) to an archive mailbox or export them to standard mbox or plain text files for backup purposes or import into other applications. You can select to move all messages or only messages sent within or certain period as well filter messages based on their read and flagged status.
– Change SMTP Server (Mail): Switch between different already defined SMTP servers or define a new one. This is especially useful if you are using your computer in more than one location and have to switch servers for several accounts at once.
– Create Rule (Mail): Create a new rule based on the first of the selected messages. This saves you the trouble of copy/pasting address or other info between the message and the rule window and provides a much quicker way for setting up a rule with multiple criteria/actions.
– Remove Duplicates (Mail): Locate all duplicate messages found in the selected mailbox(es) and move them to a separate mailbox for easy removal (duplicate matching is based on the unique message header “Message-Id”).
– Schedule Delivery (Mail): Allows you to send individual messages at predefined times (this script uses iCal for scheduling message delivery).
– Many additional features.

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OmniFocus Gets a Ship Date

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I’ve written before about just how much I like the OmniGroup applications for my Mac. I’ve been participating in the “sneaky peak” alpha of their latest application, OmniFocus, since it first was released. I really like this application. It allows me to manage the big and small projects in my life without getting in the way. As Omni has gone through the development cycle the application has just got better and better. Anyway, Omni has announced it will be released as 1.0 on January 8, 2008. There is still time to give it a test run though. Head on over to the OmniFocus site and check it out. Ethan has also started a series of screencasts on their site that are excellent and really give you a handle on OmniFocus in no time at all.

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New FileMaker-lite Product Bento

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Today Apple owned Filemaker announced a new product that appears to be a lighter version of their relational database. There is a public preview that will work until the product release in February 2008. I’ll give it a whirl and report back here. If you are interested, you can download it here. I confirming email is now 30 minutes overdue so I suspect their server load is pretty large today. You can also get more information at the TUAW entry on it right here.

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Review – SageTV Media Center

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As our computers get more powerful and our entertainment media gets more digital there is a natural progression to computers serving as our media hub. I think we are in the very begining stages of this shift but there is no shortage of products available to accomplish this. One such product is SageTV’s media center.
SageTV is a computer-centric solution for digital PVR solutions. It has versions for Windows, Linux, and OS X. The Mac install process is quick and painless walking you through a series of menu options to configure the various options available to you. You can pull media from your drive, the internet or a TV signal if you have one going into your Mac.
Once you have everything set up you are free to go on a content preference rampage. Telling your Mac what to record and when. The software can also make suggestions to you. Searching by category I found several interesting shows that I didn’t even know exist.
In addition to regular television programming, you can access google video and your own media. Like any DVR, it also gives you the ability to play, fast-forward, or pause when life gets in the way or you just want to get past the commercials.
I thought the personal media features were nice allowing me to put together slideshows of photos and some of my favorite John Coletrane music. SageTV brings it all together in a pleasant user interface.
SageTV isn’t content to just sit on your computer though. It easily converts your media to AppleTV and iPod formats. Also, using the the additional Placeshifter software you can watch your programming across the network or across the country. Using a high speed internet connection you can watch your access your stored media from just about anywhere.
One note to be wary of is hard drive space. Downloading video media takes a lot of hard drive space. The program has some built in preferences that allows you to limit the space but it is amazing how quickly you can fill up your drive. If you get serious about a Mac based home media center you probably need to get get some large hard drives.
The point that strikes me after using SageTV is just how easy it is to coordinate media on your computer. In addition to the home media center crowd, I think the SageTV software is also good for people like college students who don’t have much room for a TV and routinely watch television on their Macs. It essentially gives you TIVO style functionality along with several more bells and whistles. I think it is also good for road warriors. If you set it up right and have a high speed internet connection you can phone home and plug into your recording library from a hotel.
You can pick up SageTV and Placeholder together for $99 at SageTV.com. For an additional $100 you can also get the MyTVPVR device to get a TV signal into your Mac.

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