This week we look at Audacity, Rapido Apps, NetNewswire and much more. I want to thank you for downloading and listening to the podcast. We have the best in Mac hardware, software and websites reviews. We have a lot of great folks on today’s episode with their reviews and comments on software, hardware and websites that make using the Mac special. Plus I’ll have the top freeware Mac apps of the week and much more.
You can email me at surfbits at Gmail dot Com. I love to hear from you.
Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting
for Free for 30 days at gotomeetings.com/techpodcasts, no credit card needed.
Receive 25% off of all Devon-Technologies software by going to http://www.devon-technologies.com/podcasts
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net
aLunch: http://mactips-lib.net/m/software/alunch/en/main.html
MailBadger: http://www.tonyallevato.com
Hook-up: http://www.dottunes.net
SiteStatus: http://yellosoft.us/index.php?id=48
NetNewsWire: http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/Default.aspx
RapidoWrite: http://www.app4mac.com
Xmenu: http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware
Platz!: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/34271
We have Don McAllister from ScreenCastsOnline joining us every other week to talk about his new free screencast:
OmniGraffle
A full membership of ScreenCastsOnline Extra! for 6 months which includes:
The next 26 weekly shows via iTunes or direct download,
Immediate access to a catalogue of over 140 DRM free tutorials,
The tutorials are in HD, Apple TV, iPod and iPhone format,
Access to a special members only site.
The usual cost for the full 6 month membership is only $49 but they can get a 15% discount by using the coupon code MRC2008 bringing it down to $41.65 for the full six months.
Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
And now we have the Podcast in Bit-Torrent Feeds! 
… 
You can either click on the podcast link on the left and listen to it via QT from the browser, or you can right click on the podcast link and choose to “download linked file”. That will download the mp3 and you can play it from you hard drive with iTunes.
The right link below is the URL for the podcast RSS feed. Just right click it and choose to copy the address and then paste it in your podcast reader, or ipodder, or newsreader that will download enclosures automatically.
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 techpodcasts.com |
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By Lola Wong:
Agenda 4 was created by Yenco.com as a desktop application to help manage your time. Agenda has been rebuilt from scratch and has a completely new framework from it’s previous iterations, quite an undertaking according to developer Mike Yenco.
On first impression this application is the equivalent of the spiral bound desk agenda that use to sit on your Dad’s desk – you know the kind where they might have gotten as a freebie from some company and never really used it so they gave it to you as a kid to scribble on or play “bank” with?
At the risk of sounding a little harsh, let’s take a closer look at Agenda 4. The interface operates in several “modes”: Calendar, Task, Journal, iEvents, and Search mode.
Calendar mode is a straightforward panel. Agenda 4 lets you view events by day, week, month, or year – and, like any good time management software allows you to add, repeat and set alarms for events. It also runs an invisible background “Reminder” daemon, so that an alert will pop up even if the application isn’t open.
Journal mode allows you to record thoughts, notes or reflections like a sidebar in a paper agenda. Both these modes allow you to set a label and link to help organize and access what you need quickly.
The application also has the ability to search entries and even save the search criteria. It seemed much faster than scouring entries in my iCal but that may be due to the limited amount of entries I had imported into Agenda.
iEvents, previously a separate entity from Yenco and now built into Agenda 4, is an easy and fast way to create a online version of your calendar. It built a web version of my calendar in minutes, and generated an uploadable set of files in a self-contained folder. You still have to upload it manually, but it was very nice aesthetically, intuitive to navigate, and functional. Integration into your website is made easy by a) the ability to modify the graphics and html and b) has an intelligent index page that redirects visitors to the current date or the closest event to that current date.
Data can be imported from iCal and Agenda 3, but not automatically. Unfortunately you’re not able to import an entire iCal database backup and have to manually import and export individual iCal calendars (.ics files) to and from the application. It doesn’t automatically sync with iCal, or anything else (i.e. with PDAs)
and there doesn’t seem to be any other functionality that isn’t already available through iCal as far as I can see.
One of Yenco’s proudest and unique features of Agenda 4 is the “relaxing scene” that displays in the interface. This is an animation that plays next to the events panel in whatever view you have open. and has taken 2,600 hours for the developer to render in 3D models, and then compress into H.264 to get the best quality and file size. It also changes based on the time of day/night and displays a different weather scene selected from many variations every hour.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the amount of work it means to build, animate and render 3-D models and animation. (I spent a year learning and using SoftImage in an Interactive Games Developer program, so I know the amount of hours and polygons that goes into something like that!) But I’m sorry, the first thing I wanted to do was to know how to hide the “relaxing scene” or replace it with a movie/animation of my own. I didn’t need this scene to be running on something that was supposed to keep my life organized, and if I couldn’t hide it, I wanted to have the ability to change it.
I want the developer to know that this app, despite my criticism is a GREAT achievement. It has a lovely mac interface, seamless install, and runs smoothly on even my little powerbook G4. If there was a way to have iCal and Agenda interact automatically or if I could sync it directly to my PDA, I’d launch Agenda first because it seems to be less resource heavy than iCal is at the moment. Plus, if I could hide the animations or configure it to run something I want to see, I’d be much more prone to using and leaving Agenda 4 running on my desktop.
In celebration of it’s launch, the developer is also offering a free registration to the game “Magic Dice” with the purchase of a registration code for Agenda 4. At $40, I couldn’t see myself needing more than just my iCal, but if you’re looking for an alternative calendar manager with very quick web calendar creation functionality, then this might be the app for you to try.
Both Agenda 4 and Magic Dice are available to try out for for free from yenco.com.
DEVONtechnologies is a proud sponsor of the MacReviewCast podcast.
DEVONthink Pro Office 1.5.2 reintroduces scanning support for flatbed and — new! —automatic document feeder (ADF) scanners. The new scan function uses an embedded version of ExactCode’s pro-grade scan software ExactScan and supports all scanners that come with a TWAIN or an Image Capture driver. The embedded ExactScan Capture software provides many more advanced options such as file naming patterns, color correction, auto-crop and de-skew, de-screening, and optimization for black-and-white copies. The previous scan function used Apple’s Image Capture which worked fine on Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’ but was broken for third-party applications on Mac OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’.
In addition, DEVONthink Pro Office 1.5.2 comes with a completely revised iPhone web application and adds a number of preferences options for enabling or disabling OCR for incoming files and for moving documents to the trash that have been successfully converted to a searchable PDF through OCR. Fujitsu ScanSnap Manager support now also handles ScanSnap Manager’s new preferences file format.
All four editions, DEVONthink Pro (Office) 1.5.2, DEVONthink Personal 1.9.14, and DEVONnote 1.9.14, feature a number of minor interface and performance enhancements, too. This includes better web cache management and more reliable thumbnail generation for QuickTime movies (DEVONthink only). DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office also come with improved AppleScript support. Many internal functions have been updated as well and many minor bugs and glitches have been fixed.
All applications require Mac OS X 10.4 or later and can be downloaded from www.devon-technologies.com. DEVONthink and DEVONnote can be test-driven for free for 150 hours of non-continuous runtime until they need to be properly licensed. DEVONthink Professional Office sells for US$ 149.95, DEVONthink Professional for US$ 79.95, DEVONthink Personal for US$ 39.95, and DEVONnote for US$ 19.95 in DEVONtechnologies’ online shop. DEVONthink Pro Office and DEVONthink Pro are also available with the Internet research agent DEVONagent as bundles.
This is Robert Lachman from www.photographyandthemac.com. This week I’m going to review one of my favorite and most used menu items, You Control: Fonts from You Control Software.
I recently changed from Microsoft Word to Apple’s Pages. I broke down and went with the iWorks ‘08 software suite. My only problem so far, is Apple’s font selection menu in Pages. I only use a normal amount of fonts, I consider myself the average user but, I need to see what the fonts look like as I choose them from the menu. Microsoft gave me this with WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) font menus but Pages didn’t.
I’m not sure why it isn’t included. Also the list of fonts is long and I’m probably never going to use so many.
My solution: You Control: Fonts, from You Control Software.
The program, which sells for $19.95, solved all my font issues.
From a very simple pull down menu, they give you a choice of current type, favorites, recent, size and then a list of all fonts. Lets face it, you only rely on a few of your favorite fonts. They should be right at the top of your list and easy to reach. I’m breezing through the process of changing my fonts now.
Ever wonder what font you are using? Just click or highlight the type and go to the top menu item, Current Font. It displays the current font and size. Next you have Favorite Fonts. I use this most of the time. Adding fonts to this list is simple. Just pick a type font and select add to favorites.
Recent Fonts is next. The software keeps track of what you like to use. How simple is that? Changing the size is another option down the menu list. Last is a complete list of all your fonts. They are shown WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). As you choose the font, menus expand giving choices of style and size.
This software is a cinch to use and simply makes working with your fonts seamless. It works on all the programs I use on my computer.
This week on my website, www.photographyandthemac.com, I have started a list of some of my favorite photographers websites including mine, added some cool frame examples from Essentials 2, and started my “Win a Dusty Old Kodak Brownie Contest” in May. Check it out if you get a chance.
By David Sparks:
BBEdit is the 800 pound gorillla of text editors. People have switched to the Mac just to run this program. So what is so special about BBEdit? I’d have to say the answer is a combination of utility and pedigree.
BBEdit goes back System 6. This application is not a word processor but a text editor. While you could write a novel in BBEdit, it is more suited to prepare the web site promoting your novel or, better yet, the video game based on your novel. Put simply, this application is the equivalent of a super powered nail-gun in the tool belt of all code jockies.
BBEdit supports just about every software and internet development language you can think of. Using version 8.7 it support most, if not all, of the major languages including Objective C, Perl and Java just to name a few. Better yet, its plug-in architecture allows the creation of custom modules to support any language.
Getting back to its pedigree, BBEdit is a very mature application. The current version 8.7 has years of improvements tweaks. Many of the innovations are obvious like code folding using Apple’s familiar disclosure triangles. Just as impressive as the big features are the little ones that don’t show themselves right away. For instance, when you close BBEdit and then re-open it later, it remembers where you were when you left off and opens the same files in the same places. It even mounts onto FTP automatically. BBEdit allows you to search and work on multiple files at a time and can handle enormous files sizes.
It tracks and allows the merging of changes in a way that is both smart and intuitive for programming. It also has a robust version control system.
One nice feature is the ability to turn down the language support. You can actually turn off language specific features for modules you don’t plan to use. BBEdit also includes a variety of Automator actions and Applescript support to automate your Mac.
Having finally gone full circle with this application I began playing with it as a text editor and not a programming tool. Indeed I wrote this review in BBEdit. It has some very powerful features when used in this capacity. I could particularly see using it when putting together forms with repetitive text strings. For everyday word processing however, I’m still using my concoction of Scrivener, Word, and Pages.
BBEdit actually has registered its logo phrase, “It doesn’t suck” and indeed is does not. I have to admit I was a little intimidated about reviewing BareBones BBEdit. Some people make their living in BBEdit and work in it every day. I thought, however, as a new user it would be interesting to see how easy it was to find these powerful features. Bare Bones did an impressive job of making these very deep features accessible to new users. That is no easy feat.
An individual license for BBEdit license runs $125. If you spend any amount of time in software development or web coding, you owe it to yourself to take a hard look at this application.
By Lola Wong:
This week, I got to try out “Hear” from joesoft.com – a Mac app that is meant to improve audio quality in movies and music throughout all of your Mac OS X applications.
First thing first – it’s only system requirement is Mac OS X 10.4 or higher! Huzzah! This makes makes me happy, of course, as I’m still running Tiger on my two main work horse computers. (I will have you know I did manage to install Leopard on an old Powerbook Titanium DVI G4 so I’ve partially dipped my toe into the pool of Leopard. Just give me some time to wade in…)
Second thing – my mac is tiny and old, and the speakers on it really don’t pump out audio that it needs to. I need to revert to headphones or speakers, and even then, it’s only two speaker setup. I simply don’t have the decent system that allows surround sound, and that’s at work and home.
So imagine my surprise after first launching Hear, that suddenly with a click of a button I could watch a movie in surround sound, or even stream my iTunes with amazingly enhanced audio. I’m able to kick it up a notch and play music or watch a movie with this enriched sound, without having the true gear to play it through.
It’s pretty clear that the developers at JoeSoft (a division of ProSoft Engineering) take their mac apps seriously. The interface, for instance, allows for a fierce amount of presets and a robust, but fairly navigable, panel for the audiophile to adjust a cornucopia of settings to their liking. During the time I started testing this app out, there has already been an update from version 1.0 to 1.0.1, multiplying the amount of presets available. As a registered user, you can even save your own personal tweaked presets.
In addition to many settings one can fine tune, you can also set the chain order of the effects applied to the audio – Effects, 3D surround and Space. You can even go so far as to view your equalizer in a curve or slider view – control for the hard core audiophile.
Also included something called the “Brainwave Synthesizer” allowing you to adjust personal style of hearing – basically an oscillation setting. I can’t say the oscillation was very relaxing but perhaps it was the choice of music I was playing…
When you launch Hear, it actually acts as a system-wide panel that allows you to control or make adjustments to ALL the sound in OS X. The Mixer panel actually allow you to enable, disable, or adjust the volume of the audio from different applications that are active.
What is interesting is that you don’t have to have Hear open after the initial launch in a session to have the sound from you mac still “enhanced” – yup, the first thing I noticed is that there in fact is a Hear daemon running in the background, so that once you set the preset, or make the adjustments on the board, you can close the panel but the audio still plays with the enhanced effects!
Hear uses digital signal processor programming and the hardware on your mac to enhance the sound that’s played through your computer. This means, that when you install Hear, or updates, there will be a need to restart the computer.
With Hear, I admit, the music I play on my mac is richer, the movie sound and dialog is much clearer, and I can only imagine that game audio would be incredible using this app.
But at $49.95, this is an application I would recommend for the hardcore audiophile who is interested in fine tuning or those who like to be able to have optimal sound for the environment they may find themselves in when playing something with audio from or on their mac. With Hear, if you didn’t notice it before, you can definitely notice the boost it gives to audio from your mac. It’s similar to not having glasses and then putting on a proper set of spectacles – everything is clearer, bigger and better!
There’s a 30-day demo available for Hear at www.joesoft.com – it’s a great way to test it out and see how much you’ll never want to go back to “default” sound.
This week we look at BBEdit, Agenda 4, YouControl: Fonts, Mailsteward and much more. I want to thank you for downloading and listening to the podcast. We have the best in Mac hardware, software and websites reviews. We have a lot of great folks on today’s episode with their reviews and comments on software, hardware and websites that make using the Mac special. Plus I’ll have the top freeware Mac apps of the week and much more.
You can email me at surfbits at Gmail dot Com. I love to hear from you.
Sponsor: Try GotoMeeting
for Free for 30 days at gotomeetings.com/techpodcasts, no credit card needed.
Receive 25% off of all Devon-Technologies software by going to http://www.devon-technologies.com/podcasts
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
OpenSource as Alternative: http://www.osalt.com
Xtastes: http://www.eagle-of-liberty.com/xtastes
GanttPV: http://www.pureviolet.net/ganttpv
Cinepaint: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cinepaint
AlphaBaby: http://alphababy.sourceforge.net
Max: http://sbooth.org/Max
Drive-in: http://www.flip4mac.com/drivein.htm
ooVoo: http://www.oovoo.com
Warp: http://www.ksuther.com/warp
Allison Sheridan from the NosillaCast Podcast cannot join us this week.
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and looks at:
BBEdit: http://www.barebones.com
Chris Marshall from ChrisMarshall.ws joins us and we talk about:
FoneLink: http://www.novamedia.de
MailSteward: http://www.mailsteward.com
Developer, Danny Greg cannot join us today.
Get 15% off BitClamp by using the Code “SURFBITS” at crimsonskysoftware.com.
Jeff Powell cannot join us today.
Lola Wong Joins us on the podcast. lola reviews:
Agenda 4: http://www.yenco.com/agenda
Darren Rolfe from MacWingNut.com cannot join us today.
Robert Lachman, L.A.Times Staff Photographerjoins us. His Web site is PhotographyandtheMac.com, and he reviews:
Youcontrol: Fonts: http://www.yousoftware.com/fonts/
We have Don McAllister from ScreenCastsOnline joining us every other week to talk about his new free screencast:
Automator for OSX
A full membership of ScreenCastsOnline Extra! for 6 months which includes:
The next 26 weekly shows via iTunes or direct download,
Immediate access to a catalogue of over 140 DRM free tutorials,
The tutorials are in HD, Apple TV, iPod and iPhone format,
Access to a special members only site.
The usual cost for the full 6 month membership is only $49 but they can get a 15% discount by using the coupon code MRC2008 bringing it down to $41.65 for the full six months.
Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
And now we have the Podcast in Bit-Torrent Feeds! …
You can either click on the podcast link on the left and listen to it via QT from the browser, or you can right click on the podcast link and choose to “download linked file”. That will download the mp3 and you can play it from you hard drive with iTunes.
The right link below is the URL for the podcast RSS feed. Just right click it and choose to copy the address and then paste it in your podcast reader, or ipodder, or newsreader that will download enclosures automatically.
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techpodcasts.com |
Technorati Tags:
software, review, mac, apple, iTunes, Mac mini, podcast, Macreviewcast, podcasting, maccompanion, OSX, iPhoto, flickr
Hi everybody, Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast here, hosted over at podfeet.com.
This week I’m going to review a piece of software that is supposed to delight us in its ability to find, download and convert videos and photos from the internet and have them automatically sync into your iTunes and iPhoto. The product is called Web2 Delight from globaldelight.com.
Remember my complaint with a tool a while back that their website didn’t really explain what the tool could do? This is definitely no a problem with Web2 Delight! The website is chock full of explanations of all the different things you can do, and the help files in Web2 Delight are detailed and very well organized and well thought out. They’re so well done that I have a feeling they were done using ScreenSteps! Ok, enough about documentation, but I did want to mention all that because I was able to discover a lot more cool features BECAUSE of their good documentation!
Web2 Delight has a classy interface, very Mac-like. The left side bar is pre-populated with seven sites - YouTube, Veoh, BlipTV, Flickr, Picasa, Webshots and Photobucket. A simple click on any one of these and you’re greeted with a grid of videos or photos depending on what you’ve chosen. Let’s use YouTube for example. type in a search term and you’ll get a big list of videos from which to choose, and 4 different ways to view them. If you see one that looks intriguing, you don’t have to download it to view, a simple click and it comes up in a BEAUTIFUL interface. Watch the video, or choose from a sliding row of videos that smoothly scroll across the bottom of the screen. there’s a menu button that lets you grab an embed or regular link so you can post it in your blog - all without downloading anything.
Once you download the video you can play it full screen or within the main window, and it looks great. Search works really well in Web2 Delight but it doesn’t appear that there are any other ways to find content - no most populoar, no “my subscriptions” or anything like that. This was especially a problem in the photo album sections because there was no organization of the photos - just piles and piles of them not in albums or sorted up in any way. when i clicked on Picasa it let me set up my account to be accessed, but when i got in there the photos weren’t in their albums - more like someone had just spilled a box of photos all over the floor.
Photos and videos can be previewed in a list, a list plus thumbnails, just thumbnails or a nice coverflow option. When i first looked at the photos I was kind of disappointed in the size of the thumbnails which didn’t scale well, but all I had to do was click on them to download and then they came up full screen and were gorgeous! Web2 Delight lets you create albums for photos by dragging them in, and you can also create smart albums. I tested that feature, and chose flickr, all photos with the word sandpaper in the title. i could have had them automatically put into iPhoto or just keep them in Web2 Delight. I’m not sure why i’d want to do this, but it worked as advertised and was kind of interesting. Viewing the photos really was cool - like I said it jumps into full screen, and it gives you the controls when you move your mouse, but it also hovers up the name of the photo on the top of the screen - a really classy and well done effect.
Web2 Delight integrates 4 different photo sites and 3 different video sites, so you can pretty much pull in most of the big sites’ content into one interface. A single menu click converts videos to iPod format and transfers them right into iTunes too. Web2 Delight will run you $19.95 US and does a good job of delivering on its promises.
Before I sign off for this week, I have to say that this was a TOUGH product to review, because once I did a search on YouTube videos I just kept watching them and I’d realize I forgot all about doing the review! then i worked on the smart album of photos, but I found all these REALLY interesting photos of sandpaper! Web2 Delight should come with a warning label or something.
David Sparks here from macsparky.com this week I’m taking a look at iWeb Buddy from Zarra Studios
When it comes to web development, I’m hardly a power user and I’ve found iWeb to be just fine for most of the web based projects I’m involved with. That being said, there are a few features I do miss in iWeb 08. Zarra Studios comes to the rescue with its $25 add-on for iWeb called iWeb Buddy. Put simply, iWeb Buddy picks up the slack for iWeb.
First, it allows you to manage multiple domains. While iWeb natively supports multiple sites, it does not allow you to separate these sites into multiple domains. iWeb Buddy makes it easy to manage my family site (which publishes through .mac) and some other business sites that are published elsewhere.
Another shortcoming in iWeb is web statistics. Using iWeb Buddy you can enable statistics tracking such as Google Analytics or Mint. iWeb Buddy puts the necessary scripts in and gives you access to all of those great statistics so you can figure out exactly how many people from all over the world are reading your site. As an aside, macsparky.com is huge in Fiji. Go figure.
iWeb Buddy also gives a boost to RSS support. It allows you to get that RSS button off the top of the page and place it where your readers are more likely to notice it and it also allows you to tie your feed into statistical tracking services, like Feed Burner. Finally, you can make your iWeb site friendly to social bookmarking services such as Digg and del.icio.us. You simply click a preference and iWeb Buddy does the rest.
iWeb Buddy is designed around iLife 08 and a license will cost $25. I know some of the functions in iWeb Buddy can be found in other applications. A few of them are even free. However, the benefit of iWeb Buddy is in the combination of these tools all in one place and ease of application. If you are looking to upgrade your iWeb site, iWeb Buddy should scratch the itch. You can find it at zarrastudios.com.
As a special offer this week, Zarra Studios is kindly offering 10 copies of iWeb for us to give away on the podcast. So listen to The MacReviewCast this Saturday, May 3rd, 2008, episode #158 to find out how to win one.
