This is the last release under the name of “Democracy Player”, soon to be Mira. Included in this mature beta are several new features. Among them, auto-updating (using Sparkle), “folder watching”, resume playback, better proxy support, improved performance, and more. Folder watching is a feature that automatically adds videos located in a specified folder to your collection. For more, go here.
The makers of Mac Pilot, Koingo Software, have released a new application called Swift Share. It manages Mac and Windows shares over your local network.
“Koingo Software is proud to announce a new member to our family of products: Swift Share!
Swift Share is a share points and file server management tool for Mac OS X. Available for a free 15 day trial, Swift Share can later be purchased for a small $19.95 shareware registration fee.Share points are points across the network at which remote users can access your files. Mac OS X gives you one default share point: your home directory. However, if you’re anywhere but home, you won’t want to be giving everyone access to your entire home directory! Using Swift Share, choose only which folders you want to share and which users have access.”
I will try to have a review of Swift Share up this week. You can learn more about it by clicking here.
This Press Release was brought to us by A Media Partner of ours, prMac, which we told you earlier this month, and that we have become a Media Partner of theirs, and we have a link under Media Partners on their site.
Rating: 4.5/5
General Info: Mozy Backup is a cool online backup service, with versions for Macs and PCs. There are two types of Mozy accounts, Free, and Unlimited. Free comes with 2GB of space to back up to, while Unlimited can back up as much as you want. The unlimited plan costs $4.95 a month.
The Mozy client for Mac (Beta, Universal, requires Tiger or later) has two modes, both of which can be used at the same time. The first mode is Backup Sets, where you can choose a spotlight query, and have all files that spotlight returns be backed up. It has some predefined back up sets, for things like iTunes library, Word Files, etc. The second mode is where you can manually select files and folders to back up.
There are two ways to back up, scheduled, or on idle, and when it is backing up, it does so silently. You can check the status in the menu bar. The backups are all incremental, so the first backup is a lot longer than subsequent ones.
Mozy has a referral system, so if you are referred by someone, you and that person both get an extra 256MB. Here is my referral link: https://mozy.com/?code=HSC4ZA
Price: Free, or $4.95 a month for Unlimited.
Site: http://www.mozy.com/
Rating: 4.5/5
General Info: The aptly named app, What ToDo, is relatively simple, but that is no criticism. For a newcomer in the increasingly more complex field of Mac apps for “Getting Things Done”, What ToDo is near the top. The whole focus of this app is not a general repository of every little note and idea like other GTD apps. What ToDo focuses wholly on what needs to be accomplished by having only “To Do” items.
I’m growing to prefer it that way. A plethora of great, free note-taking apps already exist. A “To Do” app with many of the GTD concepts in mind make this stand out. The learning curve of this, compared to apps like iGTD, is very small. Handled expertly in What ToDo are: pages in the “Shelf” (sidebar), nested folders of ToDo items, and .Mac syncing. If you’ve seen what OmniFocus will be like, then you have a good idea of how What ToDo operates. In fact, What ToDo can be eerily similar to OmniFocus, which I consider a good thing.
What What ToDo doesn’t do well is handle “contexts” (which are like places in GTD). Annoyingly, What ToDo comes preloaded with ToDo items already. After easily deleting these initial ToDo items the “contexts” still remain; and now we come to the main problem. When you switch to the “context” viewing mode, the unused “contexts” are still listed, even though no items apply to them. This app needs some minor visual tweaks in the color of the numbers’ backgrounds in the “Shelf” and a few other things, like the fact that the sidebar is labeled “Shelf” at all. Does iTunes have a label identifying the sidebar as “Sidebar”? For a ToDo manager this app needs a setting for what happens to completed items, a la iCal. What What ToDo doesn’t do at all is sync with anything other than a Mac. This is the crux of many GTD solutions. A GTD system has to be accessible anywhere. Nevertheless, What ToDo is an amazing way of managing ToDo items, especially for a first release. What ToDo is a tad on the pricey side, but is still worth it’s price to many.
Retail Price: $29.00
Site: http://www.objectivesatisfaction.com/what_todo/
Rating: 4.5/5
General Info: Thinking of waiting a minute or so to start up Photoshop should make you cringe. Specifically, it should after using Picturesque. Now before I go on, realize that Photoshop is still the image editing app for complex edits that the small tools can’t handle. For one the of the newest “small tools”, Picturesque fares very well. Nearly every Mac guru needs to “beautify” images for avatars, print stuff, blogging, and general website production. Picturesque bills itself as the app to do the basic editing you do 90 percent of the time. Unsurprisingly, Picturesque knows how to do these tasks very well. It’s capable of applying shadows, glow, rounded corners, reflections, and much more. Another time saving aspect of Picturesque is automation that can handle large batches of images. Some more operations Picturesque can perform are: resizing with or without proper aspect ratio, convert common image formats, add borders, and fade borders. Whew, that’s a lot. Few trips to the slow and increasingly bloated Photoshop are welcome.
What isn’t great about Picturesque is the fact that it doesn’t show where the borders of the image are. This may not seem important until you add shadow, glow, or reflections. This is the only thing that I really disliked , which is really good for a 1.0 product. My advice on Picturesque is to see if it will save you enough time compared to Photoshop, and if it does, definitely check out it out.
Retail Price: $19.50
Site: http://www.acqualia.com/picturesque/index.html
Rating: 4.5/5
General Info: New from Panic, a longtime Mac software company now 10 years old, is Coda. Coda is a groundbreaking app for web developers. What Coda does differently is that it has one multi-tabbed window for all of your work. This helps keep you focused on the task at hand as well as saves your time by not switching between apps. Coda combines all of the tools you need to make a website in one window, except Photoshop. The tools are quite a nice combination that together make Coda worth significantly more than it’s current price of $79, and $99 after a week or so. Coda starts out as an iPhoto type interface for organizing websites. As soon as you click the site you want to work on, your workspace appears. You can make tabs filled with text editors, a live preview, a GUI for editing CSS, Terminal sessions, and reference books. All of the workspaces can be split in two directions and may contain the previously stated items.
The text editor is very advanced, featuring collaboritive sharing licensed from the makers of SubEthaEdit. All of the usual languages are supported and included niceties like syntax completion. Also included are macro-like “Clips”, hints, and validation. Where Coda is most behind currently is it’s text editor, mainly due to the sheer power of TextMate, BBEdit, and others. Still, the text editor is powerful enough for me.
Located directly in the sidebar is one of the fastest FTP clients for Mac. Two simple tabs allow switching between local and remote directories. One of the more innovative features of Coda is “Books”. “Books” is essentially a built-in, ebook reference library for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and more to come (according to Panic).
Just the 1.0 version of Coda is amazing and Panic continually alludes to massive, and free, improvements in the works. Coda has a few bugs and is missing a few things, like scriptability, but is a solution all web designers should at least try. Most of all, Coda is fun to use; so much so that this entire review was written in Coda collaboratively, between PhoeniX42 and EDIT-XTREEM.
Retail Price: $79 introductory price, $99 later
Site: https://www.panic.com/coda/
I have been playing with coda for about an hour, and I would just like to post some first impressions.
It is basically a really nice combination of BBEdit, CSSEdit and Transmit all rapped into 1 product. It is a great alternative to spending $125 on BBEdit, $29.95 on CSSEdit and $29.95 on Transmit. Thats a savings of over $100. It includes 4 books, (not hardcopies, but digital books) that are accessible within Coda.
Click here for a full review of Coda. iAppblog will try and have its own review up ASAP.
As spoiled by MacApper yesterday, Panic Software released Coda, a new app for just about everything for coding, uploading, testing and previewing your sites. I have known about Coda for quite some time, since I’m a beta tester. I will make sure that iAppblog has a review of Coda up later this week, but in the mean time, download a trial of Coda from the panic website (which I think is a great site!).
MidnightApps has recently announced Cha-Ching 1.0. They have added tons of new features and great graphics to make this 1.0 app nearly perfect. A review will com later in the week, but for now, you can visit their web site, at; http://midnightapps.com/.
EDIT: It turns out that there was already a review of Cha-Ching 1.0.
Rating: 4.5/5
General Info: Sutra means thread or string that holds things together in Sanskrit. Metaphorically though, it means much more about tying things together. So how does CoverSutra tie album covers and music together?
Well, let’s start by stating that the main reason to use CoverSutra is if you dislike the built-in iTunes controller. The major items that set CoverSutra apart are: it is one the slickest iTunes controllers ever, a sleek view of album art on your desktop, and “Audio Scrobbling” support with Last.fm. Also offered are more controls like shuffle, repeat, and rating. CoverSutra includes standard features like customizable shortcuts (including Apple Remote) and Growl support. The thing I hated almost immediately about it at first was that the controller window closes when focus shifts to another window. Say for example you want to switch to Safari, then the controller window fades away. It’s really annoying at first, but I quickly got used to and even prefer it. Still, many users would like the option to keep the controller window open at all times. Another oddity is that the album view on the desktop doesn’t always keep the aspect ratio of the artwork. CoverSutra could use some minor bug fixes and features, but it remains my iTunes controller of choice.
Note: For a limited time a free version is available at http://macheist.com/.
Retail Price: ?¢‚Äö¬¨9.95
Site: http://coversutra.com/
