Rating: 4/5

Over the last few day I have had the pleasure of playing and reviewing Check It from SmithMicro Software. Check it is a system performance suite for mac that allows you to unclutter, backup and maintain your mac. It includes 3 applications, EMC Retrospect Express, Spring Cleaning and TechTool Platinum.

Spring Cleaning is an application that allows you to clean up your computer and remove unnecessary applications, documents, pictures, movie or other files. There are three feature that I find to be most important, a feature called sizemanager that allows you to have a graphical view of all the file’s sizes on your mac. There is also the Secure Delete feature that securely deletes sensitive information. I also like the quick compare feature which allows you to quickly spot differences in files.

EMC Retrospect Express is a backup application designed to simply, quickly and easily backup your files. It allows you to backup to internal or external hard drives, flash media drives including “thumb drives” and DVD/CDs. Retrospect has an amazing Fast Backup feature which analyzes your files on your first backup, and for subsequent backups, only backups the changed files, making a quick, easy backup. Another great feature is the ability to backup preferences and settings.

TechTool Platinum is a great app for maintaining and checking your mac. If you mac ever gets into an unbootable state, just boot from your edrive, a mini partition containing a mini version of OS X, just enough to get your mac backup and running. You can preform comprehensive tests on your macintosh from right inside the application.

Overall Check it is a great suite of applications and I highly recommend it to users who want to keep their macintosh in tip top condition.

Price: ?Ǭ†$99.99
Site:?Ǭ†http://www.smithmicro.com/default.tpl?group=product_full&sku=CKTSSCD

Rating: 4/5

Syndicating RSS feeds is not typically handled like email. Cyndicate’s main difference from other RSS readers is that it handles storing articles and other RSS item almost exactly like an email client. Say you find an interesting, but long, article on some Mac news item, Cyndicate allows you to not just flag it, but label it with a color and move it to a folder for later reading. This method also makes for a very competent way of archiving your favorite articles over time. Cyndicate’s search feature is very reminiscent of Apple Mail. Reading your RSS feeds offline is another very compelling feature that migrated its way from Apple Mail. In my opinion, the most useful feature in Cyndicate is Smart Folders. Smart Folders can automatically categorize articles, instead of the more time consuming use of Folders. Users of the discontinued app PulpFiction will definitely want to try Cyndicate, as Cyndicate’s feature-set is based on PulpFiction. Cyndicate is nicely thought out; it even does some things differently when the option key is held down.

The extent of work to setup the Filters feature and the fact that it’s hidden in the preferences is one aspect that doesn’t seem well thought out. Many people hate email for a reason. Cyndicate carries over some of the pains of email to RSS reading. The intimidation of an inbox filled with 1000+ articles aside, some people don’t care about saving news for later and having large archives. Because of this, Cyndicate is not for everyone. You have to use the trial edition first to truly see if you prefer this approach.

Version Reviewed: 1.0.1

Price: $29.95

Site: http://cynicalpeak.com/cyndicate/

Today we are looking at iTweet, a tweeting service for your iPhone.

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Rating: 4.5/5

CSSEdit is my favorite app to edit and preview CSS. It’s got really good WYSIWYG CSS editing, and a live preview of what your editing. On the preview window you can inspect every element of the page. It’s got an editor and preview window. Now the editor is really what makes CSSEdit shine. It formats your CSS automatically and with a click of a button you can validate it. It’s got nearly every CSS attribute in the WYSIWYG editor, and puts out perfect working code. You can chose to use full WYSIWYG, WYSIWYG with code editing, or just code editing. It’s the perfect companion for TextMate.

Version Reviewed: 2.5

Price: $29.95

Site: http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/

Rating: 2.5/5

NewsLife is one of the most unusual RSS readers I’ve used, and not necessarily in a good way. As a positive example, NewsLife’s icon changes to display the number of unread articles in a very large, readable font. Additionally, the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìbreadcrumb?¢‚Ǩ¬ù navigation along the top is very nice. Adding, removing, importing, and exporting feeds is as easy as any other RSS reader. Common features like searching, podcatching, and sorting options are present.

Unfortunately, NewsLife has a number of small bugs and glitches. Sometimes, the badge displaying the number of unread articles in a feed is partially obscured; renaming folders has a number of misbehaving attributes. Besides all the bugs, NewsLife handles marking feeds as read in very non-intuitive ways. Most salient of all the problems in this app is the lack of a ?¢‚Ǩ?ìmark all as read?¢‚Ǩ¬ù button. Feeds can be marked as read with only keyboard shortcuts or drop-down menus. The sidebar on the right is also a mess of non-standard interface placement. The ?¢‚Ǩ?ìQuick View?¢‚Ǩ¬ù section belongs in somewhere in the left sidebar. Instead of taking the approach Apple chose with iTunes, Mail, and Finder 10.5, NewsLife put the widgets for changing some sources of the articles being viewed on the right (as buttons). Worse yet, the last used source item on the left remains highlighted when using either ?¢‚Ǩ?ìQuick View?¢‚Ǩ¬ù source. The ?¢‚Ǩ?ìNews Bin?¢‚Ǩ¬ù is nicely placed, but the rest of the right sidebar is very non-intuitive. NewsLife is cheaper than NewsFire and NetNewsWire, but that does not mean it’s a bargain.

Version Reviewed: 1.0.1

Price: ?¢‚Äö¬¨12 (~$16.59)

Site: http://thinkmac.co.uk/newslife/index.html

Raiting: 4.5/5

Linkinus is an amazing IRC client for mac. IRC is real time communication method for groups. The real difference with Linkinus is its sleek interface, which takes this cryptic communication method and makes it a usable method for the grand public. Another difference with Linkinus is its Shareware status, which means you can download a 15 day free trial from the Linkinus website for free, but once the trial is used up, you must either purchase Linkinus for $20 or stop using it. Since I have heard about linkinus, I have switched it to my default IRC application from Colloquy.

I recommend to any mac user who wants to get into public group chat. Download a trial and pop by and say hi in the iAppblog IRC chat room, click here to connect.

Version Reviewed: 1.1

Price: $20

Site: http://linkinus.com

Rating: 4.5/5

Licensed is a nice little app that does one thing ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù gives you a place to log your software licenses. There are some others out there that have a few more bells and whistles however, this is a very nice little app for free.

The one thing it’s lacking is the ability to grab or include an email directly. At least, I haven’t found a way to do that. You can cut and paste the content of an email but there are some more sophisticated licensing methods that require the original email to activate the actual license.

But, other than that it has all the right fields for filling out the information for your ever increasing horde of applications & licenses.

It’s fast, simple and efficient.

Version Reviewed: 1.0b1

Price:Free

Site:http://amarsagoo.info/licensed/

Rating: 3/5

I was a latecomer to the whole Del.icio.us tagging phenomena to handle web bookmarking. I’d been looking for something to get away from bogging down Safari with random bookmarks I might want to go back to, or send on to someone, versus the few bookmarked pages I use really regularly (those I still keep in my bookmarks bar).

Socialist is a good way to access all those pages you’ve tagged in Del.icio.us. In addition to having your own available to stroll through, you can also subscribe to friends Del.icio.us lists to sift through at your leisure.

You can also add URL’s manually within Socialist if there’s stuff you haven’t tagged on Del.icio.us. It also functions as an RSS reader. Unfortunately some of the UI and functionality isn’t quite as good as other programs, specifically other RSS aggregators. It seems to not like Atom feeds, new Blogger, etc. I’m finding it’s hit and miss as to which RSS actually will show up, so I won’t be ditching my RSS reader for this one yet.

It would be nice if you could somehow pull in existing bookmarks from your current browsers as well. Perhaps that will come in future versions. Also, the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìEmail?¢‚Ǩ¬ù button on mine used to give an ?¢‚Ǩ?ìUnhandled Action?¢‚Ǩ¬ù dialogue (v1.0) and now it just does nothing at all.

There are no help files and on their the website you are referred to forums that are empty. For now it’s a good choice for access to Del.icio.us with room for improvement.

Version Reviewed: 1.0.1

Price: $18.00

Site: http://getsocialist.com/

Rating: 4/5

General Info: While syncing is often a sticky issue, Spanning Sync does it transparently and flawlessly. What Spanning Sync synchronizes is iCal and Google Calendar events. What’s so powerful about Spanning Sync is its bidirectional syncing. Bidirectional syncing means that data created, edited, and deleted on Google Calendar will be synced with iCal, and vice versa. Spanning Sync can sync automatically every 10 minutes, 30 minutes, hour, day, or week (also in addition to, or instead of, manually syncing). You can also chose if calendars are synced, and which opposing calendar they’re synced to. Syncing is entirely transparent except when when Google Calendar changes a certain amount of iCal data (normally 50%). Besides the increased accessibility, Google Calendar adds a more convenient way to add shared or third-party calendars; such as holidays or concerts. Through iCal, Spanning Sync allows you to sync Google Calendar events to your iPod, iPhone, or other mobile device.

In addition to the previously mentioned features, Spanning Sync needs some more. One that I really missed was a way to merge calendars. Say I had two Google calendars of national holidays and religious holidays (no, not Apple), Spanning Sync could then merge them into one iCal calendar called ?¢‚Ǩ?ìHolidays?¢‚Ǩ¬ù. What I feel Spanning Sync is missing most is a way to sync to-dos with Google Calendar. As Google Calendar lacks to-dos, Spanning Sync doesn’t sync them at all. Still, Spanning Sync should take to-dos with a due date from iCal and make them events in Google Calendar (similar to this). One item bothering many potential buyers of Spanning Sync is its cost. Because Spanning Sync is commonly viewed as an application, rather than a service, a yearly fee or one-time, expensive “unlimited license” is commonly seen as overpriced. Exacerbating the situation further is the ridiculously low prominence of the prices and plans available on Spanning Sync’s website. Spanning Sync works great, but could use some more features and better prices (by about $5-15 less).

Retail Prices: $25 per year or $65 unlimited

Site: http://spanningsync.com/

Rating: 4/5

General Info: Pandora is one of those services that you either hate or love. If you love it, PandoraJam might be a useful app for you. PandoraJam provides many features only a Mac app can give you. They include: scrobbling for Last.fm (ironically a Pandora competitor), AirTunes support to play your music on an Apple Airport Express or Extreme, Growl support, updating chat status for songs (for iChat, Adium, and Skype), keyboard shortcuts, and recording. Scrobbling, Growl, AirTunes, keyboard shortcuts and updated chat status all work well. PandoraJam’s AirTunes has a very useful attribute; the volume of the can be different between computer and remote speakers.

Recording is a great way to see if you really like the song, artist, or album; by hearing it again before you buy the songs. The actual recording functionality, like Pandora itself, is hit or miss. Oddly, instead of just downloading the MP3 file, which you can do with Safari, PandoraJam records the song (a la Audio Hijack Pro). Not recording noise from other apps, PandoraJam can then add the song to iTunes, although not to a specified playlist. The recorded songs are in AAC format and can have several different bit-rates. The most prominent problem with recording, and not downloading, is that you need a newer or faster Mac to do this without skipping and generally messed up recordings. Also, PandoraJam consistently got the length of the song off by a few seconds. If you like Pandora, and want the aforementioned features, then try out PandoraJam; just be aware that recording may not work so well.

Note: Users in places other than America and the UK may not be able to use Pandora or this software. For more information on this regrettable situation, go to http://www.savenetradio.org/index.html

Retail Price: $15

Site: http://www.bitcartel.com/pandorajam/PandoraJam.html