Ave!Comics is from the wonderful Mac developers AquaFadas. They created BannerZest, PulpMotion, VideoPier, and SnapFlow. These developers are creative and unique. I expected the same from AveComics. I was not disappointed.
Ave!Comics is, as the name suggests, a comic reader for the Mac, PC, iPhone, iPod Touch, HTC, Blackberry, Nokia, and Sony Ericsson phones. It’s style and it’s comics are somewhere between ordinary comic books and animation. Add some sound and you have a special adventure that a regular comic app just does not give you.
First is the Ave!Comics Lite free app from the iTunes app store. It allows iPhone and Touch users to read comic books, Mangas, and graphic novels in AVE format. You can shop for these AVE comics at the Ave!comics website as well as a number of new websites that will be using this distribution format.
This new AVE format for comic books includes reading paths called Kinematics for a special user experience. Ave also supports multiple languages. Ave supports all comic formats, especially complex ones like Mangas. With the new AVE formatted comics you can click, start, and let the reader take you through the comics at your own pace, moving like real animation and zooming across the cells in a Ken Burns type of effect that makes reading a comic something unique.
The comic they had me test out was one called First Moon. It’s $5.99 in the iTunes app store. You can see how it works with a sample on their website. The First Moon, written by Joe Wight tells the story of how man landed on the moon. It starts by following the lives of the early astronauts from the Korean war, thru the Cold war, the space race and the early apollo missions. The comic takes about 90 minutes to consume at a slow pace and I never found it cumbersome to follow or to read. Well written, and well drawn, the story started a bit slow, but sucked me in and I found I was ready for more of these AVE style comics when I finished.
I know you agree with me when I tell you that AquaFadas does a wonderful job developing interesting and unique Mac applications. The Ave!Comics and the original comics in the Ave library are no exception. Try out the free Lite version and see what you think. I’m sold myself.
Continue reading about Ave!Comics: All Your Comic Books In Your Pocket
A lot of Mac photographers remember that Adobe took a long time to get Elements on the Intel platform. In that void several independent competitors appeared. I started using Pixelmator shortly after it came out and it has quietly replaced Elements for me.
Pixelmator is a $59 pixel pushing beast. It uses your graphics card and makes quick work of most common graphics tasks. Pixelmator delivers many (but not all) of the core features of Photoshop in a better, and more Mac friendly, interface. The general layout is very similar to Photoshop. It even recognizes most Photoshop keyboard combinations. It uses a dark grey interface similar to Apple’s Pro applications that is easy on the eyes.
Pixelmator ships with tools, masks, layers, and several useful image filters. I primarily use Pixelmator with photographs and there is the usual assortment of levels, color curves, balancing and other photography tools. I really liked the way it renders gradients in real time. I, frankly, don’t need a lot of tools as Aperture has become so robust. When I do need to roundtrip to an external editor, Pixelmator is usually enough.
Having used Pixelmator for some time, I’m also impressed with the slow march of new features the developers are releasing with each new update. They are not throwing in the kitchen sink but instead spending time on UI design and polish with each new feature.
Once your image is done, you can easily export the usual formats including PSD, TIFF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and PDF just to name a few.
While Pixelmator most certainly is not Photoshop, it is feature rich and a respectable competitor with Photoshop Elements. In my testing, I found Pixelmator easy to use but with fewer bells and whistles than Elements. At a fraction of the cost of Photoshop, you really can’t go wrong with either application. Regardless, the Mac polish and excellent interface make Pixelmator the winner for me. For $59, it takes care of all of my imaging needs. You can download a free trial from pixelmator.com.
Continue reading about Pixelmator: Image Editing For The Rest of Us
This week we look at Ave!Comics, Pixelmator, Shakespeare, MacNerdNews, Freeware plus 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.
Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
Ave!Comics: http://www.ave-comics.com/en
Ave!Comics Lite: iTunes Link
First Moon: iTunes Link
LiveMesh: http://www.mesh.com
Caffeine: http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine
AllBookMarks: http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/AllBookmarks
Raw Photo Processor: http://www.raw-photo-processor.com
JetPhoto Studio: http://www.jetphotosoft.com
WinClone: http://www.twocanoes.com/winclone
Warp: http://www.ksuther.com/warp
Preminder: http://www.hairyhighlandcow.net
MailSteward Free: http://mailsteward.com
Tom Piraino from MacinTomBlog.com and Darren Rolfe from MacWingNut.com, along with Lola Wong joins us for the latest MacNerdNews.
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
Pixelmator: http://www.pixelmator.com
Gazmaz Joins us again this week to review:
Shakespeare: iTunes Link
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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Continue reading about The MacReviewCast #218: Ave!Comics, Pixelmator, MacNerdNews and Freeware
This week I don’t have just one app as a review but I am revisiting a couple of Apps with some updates and highlighting a couple of apps that I found quite useful this week.
You may remember I reviewed Screenium from Synium Software, well at the very end of my review I mentioned that I found it odd that they hadn’t got any screencasts of their own on the website. Well I’m pleased to say that they now have a Demo video of the product, which gives you a great idea of what the App can do for you, especially if your undecided if you need a screencasting app, and it is also quite informative on how to use the application.
They have also added hotkeys to the current 1.1 version, so you can define your own key combination for starting and stopping your recording sessions. If you recall, I mentioned that you had to remember the predefined key combination, so now you’ll only have yourself to blame if you forget your own hotkeys. I’m most definitely not taking any credit for the video going onto the website, as I’m sure they had plans for it and hopefully, a few more detailed walkthroughs in the future. So if you’re still not sure if the application will be of any use to you then go take a look at the information on the website and watch the video.
Continue reading about Screenium, AppDelete, Loginox and iPhoto Library Manager
I don’t know if you recall some time ago I reviewed Pulsar which was a Internet Radio streaming App. (Podcast link) However you could only use it to subscribe to XM or Sirius radio, coming from the UK I wasn’t able to subscribe to these services. I quite liked the application but wondered if there was room for a similar App to come along and step into the breach. Well along come Radio Ga Ga.
On first impression the application reminded me very much of Spotify the Music streaming service available over here in Europe. The interface is quite simple and in some ways, like Spotify, based around the iTunes setup, by this I mean that you have high level choices in the left hand column and finer detailed choices in the larger right hand column.
Once you’ve clicked on Radios in the far left column you are then given various generic options in the main screen, these start with 50’s to Raggae from Latin to Classical and plenty of choices in between. These genres can be viewed as a list of icons or badges or in a Cover Flow mode. I preferred the static list view.
When you’ve clicked on one of these options, the main screen view changes to a list of radio stations that are available to you from the genre. Again you have a choice of views. What I’d call “big view” or again a “list view” of the stations. The website says that there are over 10,000 stations available and they will be updating their database regularly, so be prepared to do some searching.
If you don’t find a station that you already like to stream over the web, you can, if the Radio Ga Ga can accept the URL, add that station to the already compiled list, the station will appear in and untitled folder which of course you can rename, I did try to add some BBC stations but the URL wasn’t compatible so don’t expect you’ll get all your favorite Radio stations into the App. You also cannot see all the stations only those stations under the genre that you chose, this I think might be worthy of an update as I might want to search for a particular station, but unless I know which genre it’s under I’m unable to do an overall search.
This list of stations has various information, one of which is the kbps rate, this does vary from 48 up to 320 and of course the higher the number the better quality that will be streamed. Other than the obvious we’ll come to why this might be important a little later.
Continue reading about Radio Gaga: Fill Your iTunes for Free
This week we look at Radio Gaga, Bugz, MacNerdNews, Freeware plus 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.
Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
Xmarks: http://www.xmarks.com
Creating a new Profile in Firefox:
CrossFTP: http://www.crossftp.com
iConcertCal: http://www.iconcertcal.com
Miro: http://www.getmiro.com
DrawBerry: http://raphaelbost.free.fr/DrawBerry.html
VirtualBox: http://www.virtualbox.org
Gazmaz Joins us again this week to review:
Radio Gaga: http://www.gagafactory.com
Our Enhanced Podcast Producer, Steve Beyer is on and reviews:
Bugz: From Didev Studios
Tom Piraino from MacinTomBlog.com and Darren Rolfe from MacWingNut.com along with the talented Lola Wong join us for the latest MacNerdNews.
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:
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Continue reading about The MacReviewCast #217: Radio Gaga, Bugz, MacNerdNews and Freeware
So what application could have infused my taste buds this week, well Tim asked if I’d look at Mach Desktop, now that’s not Mac as in Apple Mac that’s Mach as in speed of sound Mach.
Now as the name implies this application has something to do with your desktop. The developer says that Mach Desktop brings your desktop to life with Quartz Compositions, Quicktime Movies or Web pages.
To some of you from the windows world this may sound familiar as after a quick conversation with my good friend Mike over at the for mac eyes only podcast he said that it reminded him of both the Active X desktop that Microsoft brought out and Yahoo Widgets, in fact it seems to be a combination of the Active Desktop the Mac OS Dashboard and possibly Quicktime X all rolled into one. Well lets dive right in and see.
After downloading the application my first thought having started the application was that I didn’t much care for the menu bar icon.
I don’t know why but it just reminded me of a windows drawn icon, I know that sounds a little petty but hey visuals are important.
OK, so ignoring my slight prejudice for the icon, I do have to be objective after all, I delved into the application as a default the application displays a Quartz Composition onto the desktop called Earth and Sun, this was a little disconcerting as the Earth picture displayed scrolls round as you move your mouse, this scrolling of the planet continues however many applications you have open so even if you can just see a little of the desktop you’ll catch the plant moving as your continue to move the mouse, this composition also comes with a scrolling news feed at the bottom of your desktop, this feed comes from the BBC in my case but you can set this url in the preferences in the advanced options.
Archive 6 is an application that catalogs the contents of your devices and allows you to search and launch these files through it’s simple interface.
After launching Archive 6, a window appears with a few hints to get you started. This main window is clean and the next steps to take seem to be fairly easy to figure out. To create a catalog, first make sure whatever device you wish to catalog is connected. Devices can include internal or external hard drives, flash drives or removable media such as CDs, DVDs, zip Disks , etc. Once the media is connected, it should appear in the left column of main window, Then it’s simply a matter of selecting it and clicking the “catalog” button. Simple. Straightforward. Sweet.
From there, a “catalog” of files is generated by Archive 6. The process of cataloging my entire harddrive took approx 20 mins. Cataloging my music drive (which is just over 230 GB) took maybe 5 minutes. I tried this a couple of times just to check the average speed and this seemed fairly consistent.
Through the preferences, there are options to catalog the entire startup volume or just the home folder of your main hard drive, speeding up the process by skipping over system files and focusing on the your Home folders.
If a device has previously been catalogued, Archive will detect the last catalog modification date. And will ask if you wish to simply update the exisiting catalog. A new feature in Archive 6 is the ability to import catalogs for users of Archive 5.
Continue reading about Archive 6: Where Did I Save That File?
The app I have for you is WatchMac which can be found at Bloo7.com. Watchmac is a watchdog for your Mac. Most of its features are best applied to MacBooks but some are very useful for desktop Macs as well. WatchMac watches over your Mac when the screen is locked. It senses basic intrusions or violations and responds to each type in the fashion you select.
WatchMac downloads and installs like any other application and runs unobtrusively in the background. But it does take a few minutes to setup as you have some choices to make. First you can decide to have WatchMac show up in your Dock, Menu-bar or both. Then when setting the preferences you get to choose what to monitor. Your choices of infringements include:
Sudden Movement (which has a variable sensitivity setting)
Entering the wrong password while unlocking the screen
Entering the wrong password anytime
Unplugging the power cable while the screen is locked
Removing the battery while the screen in locked
Once you have chosen what Watchmac should monitor then you can choose how it should respond to violations. Watchmac will do any or all of the following:
Flash a red screen continuously
Use Growl notifications. I did not test it, but I would assume it can be used in conjunction with Prowl, the Growl iPhone app.
Use Apple Mail to immediately send an email of the violation to the address of your choosing.
Use the iSight camera to take a series of photos of the “perpetrator”, store them in memory and even attach them to the email it sends. This is my favorite, but I can’t tell you how many times it shot and emailed my own image while I was messing with the software for this review.
This week we look at MechQuest, DMG master, WatchMac, Sena Corsa Cases, Freeware plus 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.
Try GotoMeeting free for 30 days! For this special offer, visit www.gotomeeting.com/techpodcasts
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
Devon-Tech Freebies: (Xmenu, EasyFind) http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/index.html
Celestia: http://celestia.sourceforge.net
VLC Media Player: http://www.videolan.org
Photo Grabbr: http://www.malarkeysoftware.com/projects_PhotoGrabbr.html
Gawker: http://gawker.sourceforge.net/Gawker.html
Ardour: http://www.ardour.org
iReadFast: http://gengis.110mb.com/en/index.php
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
Sena Corsa Cases: http://www.senacases.com
Jeff Powell joins us and talks about:
MechQuest: http://www.mechquest.com
Daisy Disk: http://www.daisydiskapp.com
The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To AppleScript:
Listener Ed WinStead Joins us to review:
WatchMac: http://bloo7.com/watchmac
Enhanced Podcast Producer, Steve Beyer Joins us and reviews:
DMG Master: http://www.pomola.com
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:
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Continue reading about The MacReviewCast #216: WatchMac, Sena Corsa, DMG Master, MechQuest
Snap Art 2 by Alien Skin software is a Photoshop plug-in which changes your photographs into art work. If you need to turn a beautiful landscape image into an oil painting or a senior portrait into a water color it’s a perfect fit. I tried it out with Adobe Photoshop 4, but it will work with Photoshop CS3, Element 4.0 or later for Mac and Photoshop Elements or later for Windows.
According to the developer, “Snap Art 2 expertly applies thousands of brush strokes. You simply show where you want more detail. This improved level of control makes it easy to render stunning portraits.”
The software is very easy to use. It’s simple: just open up your photo in Photoshop, click on the filter menu, roll down to Snap Art 2, and pick out the expressive style you’re looking for which include: color pencil, comics, impasto, pastel, pen and ink, pencil sketch, pointillism, stylize, and watercolor.
Clipboard Evolved installs as a menu bar application (Tim’s gotta love that), with an extreme emphasis on fancy graphics rendering. I watched the video demo on the Mach Software Design website, and the first 10 things the guy shows are the cool animations you can use to have the clipboard show up on screen! The guy has a hilarious delivery style, an odd combination of a deadpan voice with complete excitement about what he’s showing you. At first I was a little concerned that this app would be all about the eye candy, but I dug in to find out.
When Clipboard Evolved comes up, it looks like a clipboard – you know the kind the meterperson carries around? it has nice fuzzy transparency as you drag it around, and on the clipboard you see a bunch of rectangular areas to drag things into. I know, I should say “into which you can drag things” but I heard recently they said you CAN end sentences in a preposition, so get off my back! so anyway, back to Clipboard Evolved. If you see an image you like, just drag it from the website, document or wherever right into one of those rectangular areas. The odd thing is that they smash every clip into that rectangular shape. I dragged in a pic of a Mighty Mouse and instead of being tall and narrow, it’s now squashed into a horizontal rectangle. It’s not really a bad thing, it makes it easy to scroll through your clips and none of them get long and annoying to scroll past, just weird looking!
I wish Clipboard Evolved would show as a “normal” app – if i command-tab I can’t get to it, I have to click on it in the menu bar every time to bring it into the foreground. Clipboard Evolved has a ton of options you can access through the preferences, like you can make different clipboards for different parts of your lives – one for work, one for play, one for family stuff – however you categorize your online clipping life, and you get to name them for easy identification. Through the menu bar icon you can access each of your clipboards, with the default clipboard showing the most recent clips. I thought this would be useful, because you could just pull down to the image or text you wanted to paste into the foreground app, but it actually is of no use to me, but perhaps through no fault of the developers. The problem is that I have so many menu bar apps running that I can’t see the Clipboard Evolved app in 90% of my applications because the menus for those apps cover up the last couple of menu bar apps! Like I said, not their fault, but it does present a problem since you can’t actively rearrange your menu bar apps (that I know of) to your own liking, it’s a function of when you added them.
This week we look at SnapArt 2, FotoMagico, Archive, Mach Desktop, Clipboard Evolved, Freeware plus 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.
Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
Get Tube: http://web.mac.com/simonvrel/en/gettube/gettube.html
Cache Out X: http://www.trilateralsystems.com/cacheoutx
Nifty Box: http://nifty-box.com
DMGConverter: http://sunsky3s.s41.xrea.com/dmgconverter/index.html
Buddi: http://buddi.thecave.homeunix.org/en
ShootShifter: http://www.maczentrisch.de/shootShifter
Tom Piraino from MacinTomBlog.com and Darren Rolfe from MacWingNut.com joins us for the latest MacNerdNews.
Lola Wong is back with her review of:
Archive 6: http://www.yenco.com/archive/index.html
Allison Sheridan from the NosillaCast Podcast looks at:
Clipboard Evolved: http://www.machsoftwaredesign.com/clipboard.html
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
FotoMagico 3: http://www.boinx.com
Gazmaz Joins us again this week to review:
Mach Desktop: http://www.machsoftwaredesign.com/desktop.html
Robert Lachman, L.A.Times Staff Photographer joins us. His Web site is PhotographyandtheMac.com, and he talks about:
AlienSkin’s SnapArt 2: http://www.alienskin.com/snapart/index.aspx
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:
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Continue reading about The MacReviewCast #215: SnapArt 2, FotoMagico, Mach Desktop, MacNerdNews
I’ve been having nothing but problems keeping my wireless connection alive on my AppleTV the last month. I never had troubles like this before, I never changed the location of my Time Capsule or my AppleTV so why all the problems all of a sudden? I’ve tried restoring, rebooting, changing channels, a static IP, cutting down the Multi-Cast, and other ideas. So far, it works for a few days then back to dropping the wireless connection.
Continue reading about Apple facing serious backlash from Apple TV owners
