Ever been annoyed when your Mac dimmed its screen or fell asleep when watching a movie? Caffeine is a free app that stops your Mac from dimming its screen, sleeping, or starting a screen saver. Caffeine resides in the menu bar and is a simple two state button that either shows Z’s or Z’s. Get it at: http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/
As we count down the hours till Apple officially releases Mac OS Leopard 10.5, we would like to let the iAppblog readers know of something special we are planning. With Leopard, users will have over 300 new features, and we plan on sharing them with all of you. Get ready for a non stop blogging spree. As we show you the new features (with screencasts of some). If there are any features in particular you would like to see, post a comment here. Among the over 300+ new features, the most notiable are an improved Finder, colmplete with cover-flow, new mail, ichat, and safari. There is also some brand new features, Time Machine, for looking back on our system files, Spaces, workspaces for different apps, and QuickLook for getting a preview of almost any file in the Finder. You can check out all 300+ new features by visiting http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html
So stay tooned to see what we have in store for you, and keep your eyes open for some great giveaways.
Yes, as you all thought, its going to be the 26th! As soon as iAppblog gets a copy you can be sure we’ll review it.
Apple have also updated the Leopard website to detail all the new features of Leopard, you can see that site here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/
Leopard will see the introduction of Time Machine, an app that backs up your Mac and allows you to retrieve files from a previous backup. It also sees the introduction of improvements on the Desktop and Finder, which includes Cover Flow for finder. Two more of the major changes are the introduction of Spaces, which allows you to use multiple desktops on your Mac at one time, and Quick Look, which allows you to view, play and read files without opening them.
Raiting: 4.5/5
The Pixelmator team, brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide, have released the 1.0 of their revolutionary image editing software. It is a Delicious Generation image editor that works beautifully, is amazingly easy to use, and is filled with features. It allows you to edit everything from a png to a icns file, plus has support for psd (Photoshop Documents) with layers, with over 100 formats total. It uses the Core Image and ImageMagick foundations, and provides a top quality image editor. There is also a Photo Browser that allows you to access your iPhoto Libray, albums, Picture Folders and more. For those wanting to create and edit images, Pixelmator is a great choice over an application like Adobe Photoshop, at just under 6% of the price, it is a great choice for those needing to do image editing, but either don’t have the money to spend or don’t need to advanced features of Photoshop. I have enjoyed Pixelmator so much, even since the first beta, as I had a chance to participate in the beta, I have made it the app I open to do my image tasks rather than Photoshop.
?¢‚Ǩ?ìAfter two months of bug squashing we are very excited to finally release Pixelmator,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. ?¢‚Ǩ?ìWith its use of latest Mac OS X technologies, breakthrough ease-of-use, innovation and low $59 price tag we think all Mac users will find Pixelmator very useful and fun.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù
I hope everyone enjoys Pixelmator 1.0 as much as I have, and make sure to purchase it if you like it to help support future developments of this amazing product!
Price: $59
Site: http://pixelmator.com
Rating: 5/5
Mars Edit 2.0 is the latest release of Red Sweater Software’s powerful desktop blogging tool. Mars Edit allows you to create, edit and post from a desktop application to many popular blogging platforms including Wordpress, Moveable Type, Blogger, and many others. It is extremely easy to use, you just enter in you blog’s URL, username and password, and its setup. It also directs you to setting up a free Wordpress.com blogging account, or Blogger account if you do not have a blog. It scans through your flickr library and automatticly adds them to your post with the click of a button.
The new version of Mars Edit includes a beautiful new interface that highlights the features, and is also extremely simple and easy to use. There is also integration of Flickr, a photo sharing service, which allows you to upload your photos for free to their site, and showcase them publicly. Mars Edit makes use of this service and allows you to browse and search your photos within the application. There are also tons of tiny tweaks making the application work much better. At just $29.95, the choice is simple, and if you are a past purchaser, then the upgrade is $9.95.
I have enjoyed Mars Edit 2.0 so much that I have made it my primary way to post to both iAppblog and my personal blog.
Price: $29.95
Website: http://www.red-sweater.com/marsedit/
Rating: 3/5
Librarian Pro is like a more professional (and possibly better layed out) version of Delicious Library. Librarian Pro allows you to catalogue all of your books, movies, music, hardware, software and video games in one database. This means you can loan out books and track when they are due back, great for those pesky friends who keep everything a bit too long!?Ǭ†If you’ve used Delicious Library, Bruji, iTunes or a text file you can import the items stored into Librarian Pro. It can even detect software on your Mac and catalogue that for you too. Importing is reasonably seamless, although I got one small error whilst importing from Delicious Library. Sadly, many people will still like Delicious Library above Librarian Pro because of the issues with adding items. Instead of being able to scan items with your iSight, you have to enter each item individually. Although for those of you who would prefer to have more options over ease of adding items Librarian Pro is great. If you’d like to show the world your library you can easily export to HTML, although this feature needs polishing to make perfect. The interface to is very polished and everything is in the logical position, meaning it isn’t hard to browse through your collection.?Ǭ†Overall Librarian Pro seems a more professional version of Delicious Library, but it’s still lacking vital features which make Delicious Library. My advice, wait till version 2 for Delicious Library in a Librarian Pro interface.
Price: $29.95
Website:?Ǭ†http://www.koingosw.com/products/librarianpro.php
Rating: 3.5/5
Stuffit 11 Deluxe is a suite of seven applications for compressing and expressing your files. For compressing there is DropStuff. You simply take a file and drop it into this app. It allows you to create a Stuffit file (.sitx), a Zip file (.zip) or a Tar (.tar). For your expanding you have StuffIt Expander. Just like DropStuff, you just drop your compressed file in, but in this case, it uncompresses.
The only thing that I dislike about Stuffit 11 Deluxe is its high price tag of $79.99 for a compression/uncompression suite. Many of the functions of Stuffit Deluxe can be proformed by free apps, but Stuffit Deluxe gives you the avantage of having all your actions in one location.
Price: ?Ǭ†$79.99
Site:?Ǭ†http://www.stuffit.com/mac/deluxe/
Rating: 4.5/5
iShowU is an application for capturing your screen. From recording high production screencasts to showing off your mac to other, iShowU is an amazing app for any recording task. It comes in handy so often that you want to show someone whats happening on your screen, and screenshots aren’t enough. iShowU not only records video, but it can record your voice, and even the system audio. You can also pause and resume your recordings. There are also a good selection of recording profiles, which include the scaling, the frame-rates, quality, and format. It can also follow your mouse, keeping your mouse in the centre of the action the whole time.
Demo:
Price: ?Ǭ†$20
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/
