I’m Buster and I’ve got a quick review of Open Source and freeware . This week’s Open Source pick is Clonezilla. Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partclone and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for [...]
By Steve Beyer: This app really launched to the forefront last month with a press release from Aji, LLC the makers of iAnnotate. I will quote a portion of the press release dated August 12, 2010 Aji, LLC has just announced that their popular iPad app iAnnotate PDF will be part of the required course [...]
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By Steve Beyer: How often do you find that you are downloading or uploading several files simultaneously? Have you ever wanted the ability to start and stop your transfers or maybe even schedule your downloads sometime in the future when you are away from your Mac? Are you tired of waiting for your files to [...]
By Chris Marshall: It has been a while since I have done a review of an application for the Mac. Correction, it has been a really long time. There is only one reason for this, and that’s simply that I had all the applications I needed, I just didn’t have a need or desire to [...]
Gazmaz from the UK here. I was lucky enough to receive a code to try out an iPhone/iPod touch game from Chillingo called The Jim and Frank Mysteries – The Blood River. The game has more than 20 hours of engaging gameplay spread across 4 chapters, with over 60 different kinds of puzzles varying from [...]
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I’m Buster and I’ve got a quick review of Open Source and freeware that I’ve dug up to save money. Just about everything I look for is cross-platform and I’m a big believer in the open-source community but I’ll do some freeware too if it meets a need. For my first review I chose to [...]
Hi everyone Gazmaz from the UK here. When it comes to a lot of her reviews, Allison Sheridan likes to a have problem to be solved, and that’s a very good ethos to have. This review however, wasn’t going to resolve any issues of mine, perhaps except curiosity, something that I’m sure you’ll all had [...]
Jeff Powell has a review of an application he really liked called MacKeeper: Everything for your Mac in one app. We missed this podcast’s deadline, but it will be in the MacReviewCast #248. But, there is a discount code that only good until July 11th, 2010. 33% Discount can be yours if you use the code “Happy4July” when purchasing it. Head over to their Web site and check it out today!
Allison Sheridan here of the NosillaCast Podcast, hosted over at podfeet.com. Long time no chat! This week I’d like to take a look at an interesting little application from our old friends over at Ecamm. These people create genius products that are just wonderful to use. Probably the most well known among them is the application Call Recorder that gives you a simple and easy way to record your Skype conversations. It’s so seamless that people frequently believe that Skype had it built in because they forgot they bought and installed Call Recorder. I adore their BT-1 Wireless Bluetooth HD camera, played with that one just last week. If you saw my live show when Rose was in town from Australia, the only way I could do the two camera shoot was using the BT-1 added to my iSite. I know the MacMommy can’t do without her Huckleberry from Ecamm, which is a curious little contraptions you pop on the lid of your MacBook that uses mirrors to make the camera point away from you instead of towards you – great fun with a child you’re trying to get into iChat.
I could go on and on with all the great products of theirs I’ve used and enjoyed over the years, but the one we’re here to talk about today is PadSync. You know the rules, we must start with a problem to be solved. The iPad is a terrific device, but the operating system was designed so that you don’t have access to the file system. As a result, if you create a document in Pages or Omnigraffle, you have to mail that document from your iPad to your Mac if you want to work on it there, and then you end up with different versions, extra versions, and confusion is sure to ensue.
Ecamm’s PadSync comes to the rescue – giving you two way sync, not copy, from your iPad to your Mac and back. So let’s take Padsync for a spin and see how it works. Here’s the tricky steps, pay attention now, it’s tough to follow: Connect your Mac, open Padsync. That’s it. No step 3 as they say on their website.
When I tried this out, I was a little bit confused at first because it didn’t work exactly as advertised, because I happened to test out the iWork applications first. Let me explain how it works with other apps first and I’ll come back to iWork.
I have OmniGraffle on both the Mac and iPad so when I plugged in the iPad and launched PadSync, I saw a list of applications down the left side of the window, and in the main area there were a bunch of Omnigraffle files sitting there. Cool beans, these are the files on the iPad! I can double click on the files and they open from the iPad right into OmniGraffle. OmniGraffle whined a bit about the versions being different because I don’t have the latest version of OmniGraffle on the Mac but other than that the files opened just fine.
Next I tried dragging an OmniGraffle file from my Mac desktop to PadSync and a tiny little “syncing” thing came up next to OmniGraffle and in the blink of an eye it stopped and when I looked at the iPad it was there! Worked perfectly.
I kinda wish you could set a folder to sync to the iPad, that would be more true syncing in my opinion. Let’s do a workflow to explain what I mean. I create an OmniGraffle document on the Mac. Drag it to the iPad through PadSync, edit it on the iPad, sync with PadSync, but now I still have to drag it out to the Mac again and I’ll have to make sure I know which one is the latest version. You could still end up in a mess if you didn’t pay attention and edited the Mac version too. So be careful and pay attention!
Now let’s flip over to the iWork apps now that we know how PadSync should work. When I first plugged in the iPad and launched PadSync, I saw Numbers, Keynote and Pages in the application set along with OmniGraffle, but even though they said syncing for a split second too, nothing showed up in the main window when I clicked on each of their icons. A quick email over to Glenn at Ecamm and he explained that the iWork apps require you to export the files first from within the iPad app.
I opened Pages on the iPad, slid my document of choice front and center, and clicked on the little arrow button at the bottom that lets you email your documents or share to iWork.com. the third choice is “Export”. If you didn’t have PadSync, I’m not sure what you’d think that button does – it must go somewhere for some reason? Anyway, once you choose Export you have to choose the file format, which is good actually because you can choose from Pages, PDF, or Word (which is really just a .doc file). That’s terrific, I can see a scenario where you might not have Pages on your Mac, but you could open a .doc file in the most excellent free word processor Bean.
Any-who, the INSTANT I chose a format to export on the iPad, it showed up on my Mac in PadSync. This is soooo cool. I can really see using this as a quick way to move files back and forth, almost as good as if Apple had given us access to the darn file system in the first place! They probably didn’t want to take a chance we’d start rearranging the folders and make the iPad stop working, but they could have let us have access to say the documents folder!
Now PadSync doesn’t work on all applications, but they have a list over on the ecamm.com website and of course that link is in the shownotes. Many of the applications are unfamiliar to me, other than iwork, GoodReader, and OmniGraffle, but reading the other names I’ve not got some apps to go investigate. I discovered Office2 (squared) HD in that list, which says it can let you open and edit Word and Excel files on the iPad. That’s something I need to check out too!
Ok, before I get too entranced with learning about other applications I should finish up with PadSync. PadSync for Mac that Turbocharges iPad File Sharing will only run you $9.95. To have access to the file system for some of the content creation apps on your iPad I think this is a great product. Glenn said this was a rev 1 product, but I think they hit their famous simplicity of use motto right off the bat. Check out PadSync at ecamm.com.
The software I’m reviewing is called Kaleidoscope. It is available at www.kaleidoscopeapp.com. Kaleidoscope is really an amazing piece of work created by a company called Sofa. I am not familiar with these guys, but upon further investigation I quickly changed my mind. I found that not only do they create Mac software but they are [...]
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By Gazmaz,
This week I’m looking at a screen capture application that’s goes that little extra and in fact becomes useful in other ways. So what’s the app called? Voila, version 3.0 from Global Delight Technologies.
I downloaded the application, and as is normal these days the install process was pretty painless. So once I had opened the application I was confronted with a fairly familiar layout. Now I don’t mean by this that I was reminded of another application, more that the layout was a nicely put together, a typical Mac application as some may say.
There are various capture and sending options across the top bar. These are comprised of a fullscreen capture button, fairly self explanatory, a selection button which gives you a rectangle, circle, polygon and freehand option from which to capture your image. The next button is called object, this options allows you to click on almost any viewable object, and capture it. Then there is a Menu button, here you can select a menu and capture it, this also allows you to grab any submenus that you go into from the main menu option. This was neatly done with a key combination to highlight and then a quick press of the enter key to grab the selection. The next button is record but more of that later.
There is a web capture button, this allows you to use the built-in web browser, but I found myself not using that very often. I couldn’t quite see what the advantage to doing this over capturing by using the tools and then capturing from the actual web page. Another option here was to capture the active browser URL. This I did like, as you didn’t have to move to the browser and the whole page is captured when clicked, nice and quick that one. The last capture option was iSight and of course this means that you’re able to capture directly from the iSight camera on your Mac.
The four final buttons are iPhoto, this option sends the currently selected image to iPhoto, then there’s Mail and guess what, this opens your email client and adds the image into the body of a newly opened message. Next is Publish, this gives you the option to upload to both FTP and SFTP protocols and also has Flickr and YouTube options. Finally is Print, where you make make your digital image something you can hang on the wall.
Down the left hand side of the app you have a section with 3 tabs the first tab being Organizer, which gives you access to your library and some predefined smart collections all of which can of course be edited, you may also add to these smart collections or delete those that you don’t require. The next tab is called Tools, this gives you access to various items with which you can add to your screen capture. These range from erasing through adding text to adding arrows and placing shapes, the shapes options themselves have plenty of property adjustments available to you. There is also a spray can with some predefined shapes although I would have liked to been able to have a basic spray option but that didn’t seem possible.
There is also a paint bucket which fills any section you would like although, sometimes Voila did struggle in finding the borders of a section you were trying to fill. I wondered at first if this was down to the fact that I was capturing web images, but it seemed to struggle a little with images captured from the Mac desktop also.
My only gripe with some of the tool options was the fact I had to click on a small up and down arrow to increase or decrease the pixel size of the options. An example would be once I’d added an arrow if I wanted to make the arrow larger, you had to go over to the left panel and click on the property option to change. I’d have preferred to be either type in a size or a drop down so I could scroll to a size.
The final tab is Effects, and your options here range from adding niceties to the edges, skewing, cropping, spotlighting and also adding filters and adjusting exposure, contrast and a couple of other enhancements to the image. The filter and adjust options gives this app a certain amount of power much like iPhoto. Now you have to make sure when you get to this stage that you are happy with what you have, because after any adjustment in this section, when you click done, the image will be flattened and you can no longer make further adjustments to your earlier enhancements.
Now completing the interface, the main body is taken up by the screen in which your image will reside. While your on the organizer tab you’ll also see a selection at the bottom of the screen of your captured images, you can scroll through these, and you can also make this option fill the main area to enable you to see more of your images. This selection area does disappear when you move onto the tools and effects tabs.
From a screen capture perspective Voila has some great extra’s for you to enhance your image, and you can also use it to highlight something and easily send it to a friend or colleague, but it is overkill if that’s all you need, I mean Preview can do that. But the skew option in the Effects tab can come in very handy, I took a picture at an angle and wanted to make the picture square, Voila, I moved the image into Voila, went to skew, and could adjust the horizontal and vertical perspective. You can also adjust the horizontal and vertical shear planes. I also liked the Spotlight option Voila has, you can use various shapes or go freehand and then adjust the amount of blur you add to the background. There is also a little icon in the menu bar giving you quick access to the App when required, although the App does need to be running for the menu icon to be there.
So the application has a lot going for it other than being just a screencapture tool, is it worth the $30.00? Well, if you need this power yes I think it is, if you don’t then I think you want to look elsewhere. However there is another tool that Voila also has that may just make you think you need the application, it also, as I briefly mentioned earlier, has a Record option. This allows you to record your screen and audio either from the the computer and or your built-in Mic. You have to install SoundFlower to be able to record external sound. You are able to record the full screen or just a selection, this capability is fairly basic but does make the application much more compelling as a purchase, and for the $18 upgrade from Versions 1.0 and 2.0 you get a few more tools.
Overall, if you are looking for something to do screen capture with the added functionality of the screen recording, capture from your iSight, and basic photo editing, I think you should take a close look at Voila. Why not go over to the GlobalDelight.com’s web site and download the trial version and test it out.
The Upgrade from Version 1.0 & 2.0 costs $18.00 and if your buying new, Voila costs $29.95. There is an educational license for $19.95, and also some Family pack options.
This week I have a review of MarsEdit 3.0 from red-sweater.com. MarsEdit is an application which allows you to create blog posts offline in an easy editor, rather than using the web interface in tools like Wordpress. I rarely use the web interface to make my blog posts, I’ve been using the podcasting feed creation software called Feeder from reinventedsoftware.com. Feeder’s focus is on the ability to create the feed, including the images for iTunes, uploading of the audio or video content, everything to do with creating a podcast, but it also includes the ability to create your blog post for the podcast as well. I find the editor really pleasing. I wanted to make sure I gave you my frame of reference before we get started with the review.
Hi everyone Gazmaz from the UK here with a quick overview of an application I use in my menu bar to adjust the brightness on my Mac Mini.
This menu app, (which you can also run as an application in your dock giving you access to it via the application switcher), is called Shady for Mac. I’ll just call it shady though.
The Application allows you to adjust your screen brightness in increments of 5 percentage points. So from the very brightest down to 90% shade’ (Which I can tell you amazingly is still viewable, although the menu bar becomes a little tough to see). If you bring Shady to the front, this is where having it as a dock icon and therefore available to you in the application switcher, means you can use your keyboard up and down arrows to adjust the screen’s brightness.
Once you use the application it will remember your last setting. When you first use Shady it will set your screen brightness to 40% opacity, or according to the web site, this translates to 60% transparency. So if you want a little more control over your screen brightness this neat little application will help. And best of all it’s free.
So do your eyes a favor and lower that screen brightness. You can grab shady from Instinctive Code over at instinctivecode.com/shady
By Steve Beyer: I am excited to share with you my take on a program that was just updated by our friends at Many Tricks. Many Tricks is probably best know for its robust productivity tool, Butler but today we are going to talk about their light weight download manager called Leech. The name Leech [...]
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