Picturesque 2.0 is now available from Acqualia.

It is now leopard only, but it includes many new features and a stunning interface. 

Totally rewritten for Leopard, using Core Animation to power the graphics engine.

New “all-in-one” interface with popup inspector bubbles.

New “3D perspective” effect, seen in CoverFlow, Apple.com & iChat AV, etc

New presets feature lets you save and manage styles.

Added innovative cropping feature.

New thumbnail view makes it easier to work with multiple images.

Much improved batch resizing options now appear in the save window.

Can now stroke outside, inside or centered.

New icon dynaimcallydisplays your current image in dock.

Edit numbers more precisely now by clicking on them and typing.

Image now displays at maximum size possible.

Vastly improved performance in importing large amounts of images.

Added media browser.

Many other additions and changes.

I have been playing quite a bit with Picturesque 2.0 and it seems like a great application that I’m going to be keeping on my dock.

Here are some examples of images that have been beautified with Picturesque 2.0;

Make sure you check out Picturesque 2.0 over at Acqualia. I will try and get a full review up in the next few days.

iSquint is an iPod video conversion kit, a very good one to say the least. It’s built for Mac OS and runs at super sharp speeds. iSquint works with all popular video formats.
Converting is simple, drag and drop and you’re on your way to hugging your iPod. You can also convert to TV size and set the quality of the video. We [iApp] personally recommend using High or go Nuts. An extra feature is the ability to add to iTunes when it has finished converting.

See it for your self, it’s free and available now.
(v1.5.2 - 5.7MB -
03/06/08 Mac OS X
10.3.9 or
later)

How many times have you copied one thing, to accidentally replace it with something else?
Confusing I know - welcome to CopyPaste Pro. Subnamed “Time Machine for the Clipboard” it does exactly what it says on the tin.

A “Apple + C” will place your chosen copies into a clipboard. In this, you can scroll left to right to view all your clippings. You can also edit the text as CPP features a built in word processor.

This software is good for the price. The application fits into Leopard well and the menu arrangements suit brilliantly. Albeit, the softwares’ internal organs aren’t so great. A copy can hold for a second, (unable to copy, paste) which isn’t a lot but noticeable by some people (like, me..) and can get slightly annoying. There is also a floating icon which doesn’t look at all appealing ( it’s to access your clippings ) and is hard to remove.
Other than that, give CopyPaste Pro a go, it does do what it says, even if it takes a while to get there.

This Universal program is compatible with 10.4 (Tiger) and now 10.5 (Leopard).
It costs $20.00 from the ScriptSoftware store but as always a limited demo is provided.

Rating: 4.5/5

I’ve tried several implementations of virtual desktops on multiple platforms. While Spaces is not the slickest looking, it doesn’t utilize superfluous effects over usability. Spaces also is also vastly better than other virtual desktop solutions because it’s supported and included in more machines.

Spaces has some key features that make it truly great. One, Spaces is tightly integrated with Exposé. Activating All Windows will show only the windows in the current space. Additionally, if all spaces are shown in a bird’s eye view, it will show all windows in all spaces. The second major feature of Spaces is application binding, called “Application Assignments.� The crux of virtual desktops is having certain application windows appearing in specific spaces automatically, and this is what Application Assignments does. These automatic assignments take away most of the work of moving windows to specific spaces. The last major feature of Spaces is the one most virtual desktop implementations lack: a bird’s eye view of all spaces. This view not only allows you to see which window is where, but also move windows effortlessly between spaces.

Spaces has some other convenient ways of moving windows to other spaces. You can drag windows to the edge of the screen nearest the other space. For example, to move a Safari window to the space to the left of it, drag it to the left edge and hold it there for a few seconds. Spaces shows a nice bezel-like window which displays which space you just switched to. Spaces also has numerous ways of switching to other spaces: keyboard shortcuts, a menu bar item, a Dock icon, and more.

Spaces is not without its problems though. Individual spaces can only have a non-descriptive number for a name, rather than a name like Communications or Web Browsing. Spaces also has a minor bug where windows appear in the wrong space. I’ve encountered this only once in about a week of owning Leopard. It happened when I activated iCal’s preference window and it appeared in the space above the current one.

Virtual desktops are great for organizing a large quantity of windows —therefore providing a less distracting interface. Despite some minor deficiencies, Spaces is simply the best implementation of virtual desktops I’ve ever used.

Price: included with Leopard, $129 or £85

Site: http://www.apple.com/

Make sure too digg this article as well! http://digg.com/apple/Review_of_Spaces_on_iAppblog/

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/

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

Site:?Ǭ†http://www.shinywhitebox.com/home/home.html