Hey Tim, Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast Podcast here, hosted over at http://podfeet.com. This week I’m going to tell you about a tool called Berokyo from berokyo.com which is a desktop organizer and quick launcher.
The basic idea of Berokyo is that you create cabinets to organize your applications, documents and Safari bookmarks. These cabinets are beautiful artwork – my favorite is the light wood grain – looks like a varnished bookcase in your house.
Adding applications to a cabinet is easy, you just drag and drop onto the shelves. You can create categories, which are visually shown as shelf names, and you can even create subcategories. I created a category called Applications, and subcategories for Twitter and chat. I messed it up at first but it was pretty easy to figure out that you could right click and move things around. There’s a nice slider down at the bottom right so you can adjust the size of the graphical icons for your applications so more of them can fit on a shelf.
Adding web pages was a little bit harder, had to actually dig into the manual and practice before it became clear. To add items like Safari bookmarks, you have to right click on the name of a category and select Add Item. You can’t right click on the shelves because add item isn’t a choice there which seems really odd, it has to be precisely on that category edge which is kind of clumsy. I thought drag and drop would work – navigate to a url in Safari and then click and drag the url over to the category name – but while I did get the happy green plus sign as though it would work, when i let go there were sadly no bookmarks in my cabinet.
So then I tried Add Item from the menu and chose Safari bookmarks – and it imported all of my bookmarks. Yup, my cabinet is now filled with junk I didn’t want. And deleting items from a cabinet is very tedious, you have to very carefully right click on them and choose delete and hit enter to accept the deletion. They show a backspace key as being a way to keystroke delete but I couldn’t get that to work at all. It wouldn’t delete the one I was hovering over, it would always assume I wanted to delete the first item in my entire cabinet. Well, with 281 items in my cabinet, it was rendered worthless so all my work to create categories and subcategories is lost.
I created a new cabinet – this time choosing the lovely marble style, and recreated one category and populated it with a few applications. I guess after all this time I should tell you a little about what it can actually do with Berokyo. As I menteioned early on it functions as an application launcher so to get to an app you can use the menu bar icon to pull down and over to the cabinet you think the app might be in (tedious) or you can use a keystroke – for example the first of my cabinets can be launched by hitting command-1. If you had a lot of cabinets this might get difficult to remember. now you have the cabinet visible, if you only have say 3 shelves with the largest icons you can simply click on the app you want to launch and you’re in business. To get more than 3 shelves you have to start shrinking down the icons so they can fit.
You can filter your cabinet through a handy search window in the top right – so if you do get a full cabinet going and you want to narrow in on an app by typing you can get to it quickly in there.
I wasn’t able to get websites to really work in Berokyo so I thought I’d try some documents. I need quick access to my album artwork every week for the NosillaCast so I thought I’d put that in Berokyo so I can just drag it right into iTunes from there. But no, Berokyo wouldn’t let me drag it from the cabinet to iTunes. Bummer. Ok, another thing I need during the podcast production is the music Victor Cajiao made for me for Dumb Question Corner. I would love to have easy access to that so I can drag it right into the timeline from Berokyo to Garageband. But again I was foiled, Berokyo would not let me drag the music out either.
I’m afraid that the developers spent a ton of time making this a visually stunning application – the options to vary the visuals are quite lovely and numerous, but they didn’t spend enough time making it functional. As an application launcher, even with the search window it’s far too many keystrokes to get to the applications. The lack of ability to drag a website into Berokyo and only import every single bookmark you have made it pretty unusable for web launching too. Not being able to drag document content out of Berokyo was a questionable decision – the only thing you can do with documents is launch them.
I feel terrible panning this product because it’s clear they spent a ton of time building a beautiful interface, but it just doesn’t seem to be an efficient way to launch applications or files to me.
Continue reading about Berokyo: Desktop Organizer and Launcher
This week we look at MiFi, Berokyo, Accounts, MacNerdNews 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:
Evernote: http://www.evernote.com
DropBox: http://www.getdropbox.com
PathFinder: http://www.cocoatech.com
Mailplane: http://mailplaneapp.com
David Allen from Mac 2 Questions Podcast at http://mac20q.com reviews:
Accounts Software: http://www.nano.com.au
Tom Piraino from MacinTom.ca and Darren Rolfe from MacWingNut.com joins us for the latest MacNerdNews.
Allison Sheridan from the NosillaCast Podcast looks at:
Berokyo: http://www.berokyo.com/mac/en/index.html
Then Gazmaz Joins Allison this week to review:
MiFi, The Mobile Hotspot for Five:
Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
And now we have the Podcast in Bit-Torrent Feeds! 
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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 #227: MiFi, Berokyo, Accounts, MacNerdNews
So some of you out there know what AppDelete is, but for those of you that don’t know what this neat app can do, you have applications that you’ve tried and now want to get rid of, although Mac apps generally are standalone packages, you could in theory, just move them to the trash. Applications also store other snippets of information hidden in the depths of your machine. So this is where the likes of AppDelete jumps in and goes in search of those files and folders so when you move an app to AppDelete it cleans those items as well.
I mentioned that the app has been upgraded and updated for Snow Leopard but don’t worry if you have version 2.2.2 this is still OK for use with ‘Snowy’ and the developer did tell me that he is not abandoning the older version and may even still be looking to small upgrades, but from my perspective I think the improvements to 3.0 are well worth a close look.
So what does the new version give you over the older one? Well other that deleting Apps, Widgets, Preference Panes and Plug-ins, the new version also deletes Screensavers. Actually, Reggie Ashworth the developer says that it can delete anything that can be uninstalled and the associated files. Version 3.0 has also had a complete rewrite from the ground up. This has led to apparently new searching methods which I’m not clever enough to test, and although the new version isn’t 64 bit just yet he is looking at releasing in the near future, the 64 bit version.
The new ground up build also means that the app does it’s normal searching for files but the never version now automatically cleans out hidden associated items. You can also delete multiple items at one time, which I know the previous version could not do. There are improvements in speed but again, this one is difficult for me to compare. There are several other updates and features like a log-in start and force empty trash. I’d like to make a note here, those who have heard me before may remember that I use Hazel to clear out my trash and that Hazel can also delete apps and associated files put into the trash, but just to be clear, I don’t have Hazel on my Macbook which is where I’m using AppDelete.
A few things that I really noticed is the fact that when deleting certain items you may get asked for the Admin password, and rather annoyingly on the older version, if there were items associated that also needed the Admin password to delete, you’d get asked for the password a second or even third time. Well version 3.0 only asks for the password just the once, this works for multiple selected items as well.
The UI also has some menu items that are, for those of us who are used to the previous version, a bit of a revelation. You now have 5 menu items on the UI itself, Apps, Others, Orphans Log and Undo.
Clicking on the Apps option, you get a submenu (very Snow Leopard in appearance) pop-up giving you a list you can scroll through of all your applications. Each App has a checkbox by its side which you check before moving to the next step, this is done by clicking on search, which can be found on the bottom right hand corner of the submenu. AppDelete then returns a list of items associated with your selected apps that can be deleted. If for any reason you want to keep any of the items you can do so by unchecking the already marked checkbox. When you’re happy with that, you now have 4 options, Cancel, that I suppose is an obvious one, then Archive, this can be used to archive the items into a zip file which you might then store away somewhere. This did confuse me a little as I was expecting to be able to then press the delete button to clear the apps, however I was taken back to the UI and if I wanted to actually delete I would either drag to the UI or again go through the selection process. This may change in future updates. However if you have made your selection and AppDelete has returned it’s searched items, you can also log this list or hit that delete button and say goodbye to those items. Now don’t panic if after that you realized you still made a mistake, remember back on the UI there is that UNDO option.
Going back to the UI, the second option was Others. When you click on this you’ll see a list of items like Widgets Preference Panes, plugins and screensavers that can be cleared from your machine.
The next option is one to find and clean out all those ‘orphaned files’. These are files that have lost the link to their parent files and you are able to delete these files as they should no longer be in use. As this was my first time deleting these files, I first wanted to Archive prior to deleting them. This actually brought up a work flow issue that I had with the program.
There was no ‘select all’ and as I found a large number of orphaned files, I had to go through and click each one before archiving them. AppDelete then placed these orphaned files in individual zip files on my desk top. This was a small nuisance which I soon rectified by putting them all into a folder to keep just in case I needed them.
I then went onto the next step of deleting the files. I had to go back in orphaned files and then select them all individually before I could delete.
Unfortunately I was writing and recording this too close to release to be able to give you a response from the developer but I sent him the small hiccup and I’m sure he’ll take a close look and respond and/or fix it later.
The next option on the UI is Log where you can see and export the actions that AppDelete has been taking and the undo option that I have already mentioned.
So 3.0 is a worthy upgrade and since I know the developer will keep moving forward with the application and will keep the older version for those of you on the older systems, I’d say it’s one to take a look at. There are trials versions of both 3.0 and 2.2.2 so you can try before you buy on both versions. The cost to of Version 2.2.2 is $5.00 if you already have version 2.2.2 you can upgrade to Version 3.0 for $3.99 or if you’re new to AppDelete you can purchase version 3.0 for $7.99.
Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac is the perfect complement to iPhoto® for consumers who want to go beyond the basics and tell amazing stories with their photos. The software is loaded with new options to make extraordinary photos with ease. For media management, Mac users have access to all the features in Adobe Bridge CS4 software, which provides quick organization with a custom viewing workspace and full-screen preview with one-click close-ups. Keyword tags and a variety of search options also make it easy to find photos quickly.
Continue reading about Adobe Announces Photoshop Elements 8 for Mac
Making and publishing screencasts has become much easier the last few years. It used to be that screencasting applications only captured your screen movements. Current screencasting tools are much more powerful. The latest addition in this space on the Mac is the Windows screencasting champ, Camtasia.
I spent the last three weeks trying out Camtasia and while the application definitely shows promise, it also still needs a bit more cooking.
I’m going to break this review into the three phases of screencasting: capture, edit, and export.
Continue reading about Camtasia: Screen Recording for the Mac
This week we look at Camtasia, AppDelete, Dropbox, 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:
Frisco Apple Store opening: http://bit.ly/xXI6r
Notify: http://vibealicious.com/apps/notify
KeePass: http://keepass.info
Isolator: http://willmore.eu/software/isolator
Shape Collage: http://www.shapecollage.com
Desktop Lyrics: http://www.corecode.at/desktoplyrics
AlphaBaby: http://alphababy.sourceforge.net
Covers: http://www.pathossoftware.com/Covers/Covers.html
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
Camtasia from TechSmith: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasiamac
Jeff Powell joins us and talks about:
DropBox: http://www.getdropbox.com
1Password: http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password
Finer Things in Mac: http://finerthingsinmac.com
Gazmaz Joins us again this week to review:
AppDelete: http://www.reggieashworth.com/moreinfo
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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Technorati Tags:
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Continue reading about The MacReviewCast #226: Camtasia, AppDelete, and Dropbox
Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast here, hosted at podfeet.com. This review took me a long time, but it’s a good story why. I don’t know if the listeners realize this, but Tim and I both believe in doing realistic reviews, but we also want to be fair to the developers. So if there’s a problem with an application, we like to contact the developers and discuss it with them and see if perhaps we’re misunderstanding a feature, or whether there’s maybe an incompatibility the didn’t know about, or perhaps a bug they had yet to discover. On a few rare occasions we actually tell the developer that their product is just not ready to be reviewed, and they’re usually relieved to hear that rather than a scathing review. To be honest, with my reviews, more often than not I learn something I didn’t know and the developers get a great opportunity to improve their products.
When Tim asked me to review BusyCal from busymac.com I jumped in with both feet. I’d always heard great things about their product BusySync, so I figured BusyCal had to be great too. Now the reason I told you that long story of how noble Tim and I are with developers is because I struggled a bit with BusyCal at first, and it turns out it’s in public beta so that was actually to be expected. I wrote to them and John wrote back, asked for log files, they fixed the code and all of the issues I was having were resolved. Again let me say how much I like shareware and freeware developers, so much better response than you get from someone big like Apple. Good onya BusyMac!
Now that’s not all John did, John also spent a lot of time asking my questions and clarifications on BusyCal because I just couldn’t get my head wrapped around it…for the last four weeks! The reason i was confused is because BusySync is so capable i couldn’t figure out what made BusyCal special, but when it finally hit my dense little brain, I had one of those d’oh! moments! Ok, here’s my brilliant revelation. BusySync lets you sync your iCal Calendar to Google Calendar and between iCal users on your network. BusyCal REPLACES iCal as your calendaring program. Gee, that should have been easy to figure out now shouldn’t it?
Ok, let’s get into it. BusyCal, like BusySync, gives you the the ability to sync calendars across a Local Area Network, or LAN, which is geek speak for your home or work network. The second big feature is the ability to sync your local calendar with Google Calendar. When you do the local area network sync, the shared calendars are able to have read and write access – so changes on one computer change the calendar on the other computer. This could really help families to stay synced – like MacSparky’s David Sparks would know if Daisy had booked him to go to his own mother’s birthday party and he wouldn’t make other plans at the same time. See how BusyCal can bring peace and harmony to your home?
Before I started testing BusyCal, I would just send calendar events to my family, they would receive them in their mail and then accept (or decline depending on their mood at the time) and then it plops into their calendars. From my perspective I liked it because they CAN’T change the date and time!
With BusyCal you put it on all the machines between which you want to share calendars. then you open the calendar you want to share, and right click on it and tell it to share over LAN. As soon as you do that, the calendar shows up on all of the BusyCals in your network. I tested it between Steve and I and it really confused him – “Hey, I didn’t put that event there!” which was awesome. We can both move the event around, change the name, do anything we want to it and both machines are in sync as close to instantaneously as you can measure!
I also tested out the sync to Google Calendar, which again is a feature of BusySync that I’ve been lusting after for years. I linked my calendar to my Google calendar by going to Calendar –> Add Google Login. Nice and obvious! I can add events to my BusyCal calendar and they show up in Google Calendar, and also in iCal. I can add invitees and all the usual things I can do in iCal so that’s great. I did notice one thing – I added Bart to an invite, and when I look on Google Calendar I can’t see that Bart is invited. I can add more invitees though, which is great. The reason I care so much about that is that on the iPhone i can’t add invitees, and on MobileMe I can’t add invitees, so if I could add them in Google calendar, that would propagate now to my iCal, BusyCal, iPhone version of iCal and it’s all good. I’ve really needed a mobile way to add invitees to calendar events and it looks like BusyCal does that for me.
I sort of started this in the middle by telling you what BusyCal does that BusySync does, but I wanted to explain that part first and then get into BusyCal. So think about BusyCal as the calendar iCal should have been, sort of an iCal on steroids. When you first launch BusyCal, it looks a lot like iCal so it’s familiar but it has a polish to it that’s missing in iCal.
By default BusyCal shows you the phases of the moon and the weather where you are. The phases of the moon aren’t particularly interesting to me, but the weather is cool. I live where the weather pretty much never changes, but if you live in, say Maynooth, Ireland, you might want to know what day you can actually go outside and take pictures of trains or flowers. You can, of course, toggle on and off things like the moon and weather so it’s completely tailorable to what you like.
One annoyance of iCal for me is that if you’re in the month at a glance view, you can’t see the time of your events, only the day. In BusyCal you get to see the times as well. iCal has what they call the Inspector which will show a selected event in a separate floating window. When you create a new event in iCal it does sort of a popup version of the Inspector, and I find it exceedingly irritating. My instincts on how to enter dates and times must be wrong in some way because it’s always honking at me that I’ve hit the wrong key, like I hit enter and it doesn’t like that. iCal makes you use the mouse to finish an event. With BusyCal you get a panel in the right sidebar that is beautifully integrated where you enter all of the information for the event, and it never once honked at me that I was doing it wrong.
BusyCal features a much advanced To Do integration. To Do’s show in your right sidebar above the info panel, showing you what day they’re due. I didn’t play with this feature a lot, as I don’t actually keep a to do list myself! I make little ones in Stickies for a given day, or perhaps in Zenbe Lists if there’s a lot to do on a day, but since I’m not using my Mac for work, my home life is pretty easy to track what I have to get done day to day. there’s a bunch of tailoring you can do for the side info panel – you can choose what items to show for events for example. Let’s say you never enter a url for an event, you can just shut that off so it doesn’t show. nice to have that flexibility. One thing I’d like to see is if you click on a To Do in the right sidebar, if it would highlight that To Do in the calendar view – right now it shows what date it’s due in the sidebar but not in the calendar itself. If you like To Dos, one thing you know is that you have some items on your list that you have to do every week or every month – say something like “pay bills”. Believe it or not, iCal doesn’t accommodate repeating ToDos, but BusyCal does!
I love the way BusyCal moves. when you’re in the month view for example, and you click the arrow to go to the next month, the current month slides to the left to show the next month. It seems like a little thing, but it’s very elegant feeling and doesn’t add any delay to getting to the dates you want to view. After using BusyCal for a while, iCal felt kind of clunky in comparison. I put images in the shownotes of the same view in iCal and BusyCal so you can see the differences, but it can’t show you how it moves!
iCal:
BusyCal:
BusyCal even features a list view which is a handy way to get situational awareness – all of your events in an easy to scan list. In most cases I think you’ll prefer the normal calendar view but again it’s nice to have the flexibility to meet your own tastes, and of course even the list view is tailorable.
One constant aggravation to me is when someone sends me a calendar invite and they haven’t put an alarm on it. My memory is so bad I HAVE to have alarms! With BusyCal you can actually modify an event to add an alarm! now if they’d let me add someone else to the invite I’d be in heaven. I maintain multiple calendars that aren’t allowed to be synced, so using invites is critical to me.
With BusyCal you can make your calendar more fun – by using rich text formatting to make your text stand out, and also by adding graphics. I guess I’m an old fuddy duddy because adding graphics to a calendar never really blew my dress up. I couldn’t easily get the hang of how to add graphics – i could paste them into an event but if the graphic was big, it didn’t resize, and so I found myself changing the length of time the event lasted in order to make it fit the graphic, which makes zero sense! I’m sure I’m doing this wrong but like I said, fuddy duddy is the way I roll.
So here’s the bottom line. If you want calendar syncing across your home computers, and you want to be able to seamlessly sync to Google Calendar from your Mac, you should check out BusySync. If you ALSO find iCal clunky and annoying and missing some key features, you should really check out BusyCal. Let’s talk pricing now. BusySync is $25 per computer to get the Google and LAN syncing, and BusyCal is $40 per computer. The folks at BusyMac are brilliant though – they give you a 20% discount when buying multiple copies. I like that pricing plan because you don’t have to commit to five copies or anything like that to get a discount. So here’s what you should do: let’s say your family thinks iCal is fine, you could give them BusySync, and just treat YOURSELF to BusyCal for all the nice features! Check it out at busymac.com. Many thanks to John for his unending patience with me!
I just spent a week with a new hardware accessory for my iPod touch and I wanted to share the review with you today. It’s called the Belkin: TuneBase FM with Hands-Free.
I spend about 45 minutes a day in my commuting and I use that time to catch up on podcasts. Like so many other iPod owners, my car does not have a built-in plug for an iPod connection, so I have to use third party alternatives to listen to the iPod touch thru my car stereo. The easiest method is using an FM transmitter to listen to the iPod via an open FM channel on my radio.
Using an FM transmitter may be the easiest solution, but seldom produces the highest quality audio. I’ve tried several inexpensive alternatives, and although they’ve worked to a point, the problems I encountered were many and the sound quality was low. I finally tried the $99.99 retail Belkin TuneBase FM with Hands-Free and am very happy I did.
The basic construction mimics several other iPhone/iPod connectors. One end plugs into the vehicle’s power plug/cigarette lighter, and then a flexible snake-like cable allows you to bend the iPod so you can easily view it and tune it. The connection clamp grabs the top and bottom of the iPhone or iPod and below the clamp is the control center for the TuneBase. The control center has buttons for tuning the transmitter frequency up or down, the ClearScan button, two buttons to remember frequently used frequencies and what they call a Pro setting that optimizes the audio and boosts the volume.
Below the control center is the connection to the iPod which also contains a multifunction button that can be used to easily pause or play music, change tracks, and receive calls. There is also a USB plug and a 3.5 audio out jack you can use to charge other devices or play audio through a tape adaptor or external speakers.
As you can tell, this is an amazingly feature rich device. It has more functionality then any FM transmitter I’ve ever dealt with before. So after I just listed all the features, what about the performance? Although the quality was not as good as a direct connected iPod to the car stereo, the Belkin TuneBase had the best audio of any transmitter I’ve tried over the years. The ClearScan button finds the open stations and the Pro button gives you the boost you need listen to podcasts, audiobooks or music. The operation was simple and easy to manage while driving. I am actually surprised to hear myself say that the Belkin TuneBase FM is worth the $100 retail.
So what are some of the things that bothered me about the Tubebase? Well the flexible connection cable seemed to be a little too long or a little too flexible because when I drove, the iPod had a slight shake to it that I was unable to resolve. If a passenger in the car wanted to watch a video in the iPod while I was driving, they would have a difficult time with the shake. Also the ClearScan feature seemed to grab channels that were not actually clear. I would have liked to had the ability to control the signal strength of the open frequencies that it found. Other then that, I was very happy with the Belkin Tunebase FM Transmitter with hands-free. You can find it at www.belkin.com. You can also purchase it for much less through Amazon, so make certain you do a little searching before you buy for the best deal.
If you or your company are thinking about creating a screencast from a desktop application or from a Powerpoint/Keynote presentation, even video, please drop me an email at surfbits@gmail.com and I would love to discuss the project with you. Doing a great screencast is not as simple as capturing your desktop movements or animating a presentation, it’s recording and mixing audio with the graphics to create a professional screencast ready for distribution on ipods, AppleTV, YouTube or DVD. No matter how small a project seems to be, it deserves to be done right. Let’s talk about it.
Continue reading about Does Your Company Need Audio or Video Help?
This week we look at Belkin TuneBase, BusyCal, Amadeus, Omnigraph Sketcher, 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:
Belkin Tunebase FM Transmitter with hands-free: http://www.belkin.com
Notational Velocity: http://notational.net
32 or 64 Bit Start-up Mode selector: http://www.ahatfullofsky.comuv.com
Dock Library: http://www.dativestudios.com/docklibrary
Master Spell: http://macinmind.com
PostBooks: http://www.xtuple.com/postbooks
Charles Kelly’s Text-to-Speech to MP3 Applescripts: http://www.manythings.org/mac
Tom Piraino from MacinTom.ca and Darren Rolfe from MacWingNut.com joins us for the latest MacNerdNews.
Allison Sheridan from the NosillaCast Podcast looks at:
BusyCal: http://www.busymac.com
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and reviews:
Omnigraph Sketcher: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraphsketcher
David Allen from Mac20Questions Podcast reviews:
Amadeus Pro: http://www.hairersoft.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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software, review, mac, apple, iTunes, Mac mini, podcast, Macreviewcast, podcasting, maccompanion, OSX, iPhoto, Exposure 2
Well you all have the application I’m talking about this week, although to be honest, some of you will have an earlier version than the one I’m talking about. So if I have your attention I’ll dive straight in. iPhoto, see I told you you all have the application, currently I’m using the latest build 8.0.4 which is part of the iLife 09 suite.
Why did I want to chat about iPhoto? I’m not going to go through all of the great features but specifically, and emphasising I’m no expert, I was amazed to hear someone in an online meeting I was on say that they didn’t realize how much editing you can do within the application, and since I’ve just come back from holiday iPhoto has had a lot of use.
This got me thinking, I wonder how many people buy their Mac, get it home, throw the pictures into iPhoto but never get to the point where they click on the edit button at the bottom of the screen? If you’re one of those types, listen on because iPhoto is really quite a powerful tool.
So you’ve imported the photos, whether they be JPEG’s or RAW images, although if you’re shooting RAW you may already use the editing capability of another more powerful photo editing application, but iPhoto can do a lot. Click on the edit icon and you’re into a world of improvements.
Once you’ve clicked the edit icon you should see at the top of iPhoto a row of your photo’s then the photo it’s self and at the bottom a row of icons that do varying things to your pictures. The first icon is nice and easy and can also be adjusted without entering the edit mode, Rotate. Rotate your photo through 360 degree’s in 90 degree increments.
Then we have Crop. To me, this can be a really powerful way to improve your picture, go in and try. Choose a picture, click on Crop and iPhoto opens the picture and adds a white outline where you can grab the corners or any of the edges and adjust on certain parts of the picture. When you make the adjustment, iPhoto adds a grid which helps when it comes to getting your thirds correct on the photo. I won’t go into thirds here, but believe me taking note of the grid will help you compose your image. One thing I like to do is change the view to a more rectangular view. It’s amazing how you can change the shot with this tool.
Now before I go on, remember these adjustments are non destructive so if you don’t like the finished product then you can always revert back.
The next icon is straighten. We all try to take a level picture but it isn’t always possible, so go into Straighten and make that right. If you combine angling the picture, you don’t have to straighten the picture after all, just Crop and you’ll come up with some great affects.
The next icon is Enhance, this button will automatically adjust the photo to enhance it’s light and color. Here’s a trick, if you want to see exactly what is being done, click on the Adjust icon before clicking the Enhance icon. A floating panel will open up with lots of adjustment bars, with Adjust open, click on the Enhance icon, you’ll see that some of those adjustment bars move. If you want to experiment move some of those bars to see for yourself the impact your having. Enhance does a pretty good job, but sometimes it doesn’t create the affect you want, if this happens you can undo the affect easily with the key combination CMD Z.
The next icon is Red-Eye. The current Red-Eye reduction is better than previous versions but it’s still not quite there, but with some practice you’ll soon get used to using the tool for best results, and get rid of those ugly red eyed pictures that always seem to occur no much you try to avoid them.
Moving onto the next icon which is Retouch. This tool is great if you find you have a blemish on the picture, this could be because of a dirty lens or that darn fly landed right where you didn’t want it to when you took the shot. Click here and iPhoto gives you an adjustable size circular curser which you then click over the blemish and iPhoto will use data local to outside of the cursor and replicate the area with that data, you’ll see the blemish disappear, it’s almost magic.
The next effect is something I haven’t used too much but again is a powerful tool and creates some interesting effects, and each of the effects can have an impact on each of the other. So if you want a sepia, vignette photo with an edge blur go here. Again a neat trick is to have the Adjust menu open to see what impact the adjustments your making are having on the metadata of the photograph. CMD Z here does work, but there is also an original photo in the middle of the grid that pops up enabling you to get back to the photo you had prior to all changes.
Now the final icon one that I’ve mentioned already is Adjust, this is a powerful tool and something that if you’re not careful, you can spend far too much time messing about in. I’ll try and give you pointers here, but there are many other websites and podcasts to really get into what each of these adjustments can do for you.
Once you’ve clicked on the Adjust icon, a floating submenu pops up which has what is referred to as a levels panel where you can make adjustments. Quick tip, if you have a full spread of peaks on this graph leave the end sliders alone, slide the middle adjustment left or right but as in all of the adjustments you must watch the picture as you get a live view of the impact you are having on the picture. CMD Z doesn’t work here, but there is a reset button on the bottom of the submenu, this is your friend. Now if those peaks of red’s greens and blue’s I mentioned are gathered around the middle of the panel, try moving the end sliders in toward the edges of the colors, watching the picture for changes.
The next three sliders below this panel are Exposure, Contrast and Saturation. I tend to leave these alone. They can have big impacts on the end result these can often be counter adjusted in some of the other edits, yes I am probably talking sacrilege, but this is how I use the adjustment sliders remember.
The next section of the submenu is Definition, Highlights, Shadows, Sharpness and De-Noise. These sliders I find myself using more than the others, you might want to try Highlights and Shadows first. The Highlights slider will often bring out clouds that you thought you’d captured and just seem to be a white greyish mass, and Shadows can bring out definition in the darker area’s of your picture.
The last two options again will have a big impact but until your really into making these adjustments you may find like me, your not using much are Temperature and Tint. There is also a droplet icon next to Tint that allows you to remove a color cast, I have only just started playing with that option.
Another nice option is that at the bottom of the menu is a copy and paste option, you can use this to paste any adjustments onto another similar picture you may have taken at the same time, this I do use but not as much as you’d think.
As I said these adjustments are non destructive and not permanent, but in the case of JPG’s I believe that iPhoto keeps a copy of the original and one of the adjusted photo. With RAW images the metadata is adjusted and the original metadata is not lost either.
I hope this gives you the initiative to go take a look at editing your photos. You never know, that magic shot you thought you had may still be a magic shot with just a few adjustments. Here’s a link that will help you when working in iPhoto. http://www.apple.com/ilife/tutorials/#iphoto
By David Sparks:
Over the past few years I’ve podcasted quite a bit about one of my favorite Mac utilities, Chronosync, but never given it a feature review. It is time. Chronosync handles synching and backups from your Mac with style.
For instance, using Chronosync I have one script that looks at the contents of some of my most important document folders and copies them to a backup folder on my iDisk every week. This way my key documents get offsite backup. The best part is Chronosync does this on a schedule and it requires no user involvement.
Selecting files for synchronization for backup requires selection of the volume and applicable directory and selecting, or unselecting, individual components for Chronosync’s attention. It is not entirely intuitive but makes sense once you understand it.
Once selected you cansynchronize or backup with just about any device. It will work with local or attached storage or even other computers. The developer’s separate application, ChronoAgent makes this particularly easy with other Macs and an excellent solution for synching between desktop and laptop machines.
The interface makes it easy to choose between unidirectional and bi-directional syncing. So whether you are looking to simply create an archive or sync multiple changes between two working machines, Chronosync can handle it. The application can even sync non system files with a Windows PC. It analyzes your data and allows for trial synchronizations. Additionally, Chronosync can create version archives on your backup to allow you to fetch prior versions of files.
In performing this bit of magic, ChronoSync uses “Relative State Monitoring” that allows it to detect deleted, moved, or renamed files and folders, and resolve conflicts. ChronoSync protects data integrity by verifying data, ensuring proper copies are made before replacing data, and providing detailed logs. Because it only copies changed files, the process is remarkably fast.
The scheduling tool allows you to set repeating and single run backups with the precision of a Swiss watch. It even emails you when backups complete or, more importantly, fail.
Because each synchronization or backup process is its own file, you can save as many templates as you require. I’ve been using ChronoSync for several years and never had any problems with it.
A license will cost $40. Interestingly, that is it. There will never be an upgrade fee, ever. When the software recently updated to version 4.0, I got it for free. You can check it out at econtechnologies.com.
When I start my marketing campaigns for Macs to friends an families I tend to tell everyone how amazingly drag’n'drop-ish everything is. Isn’t this feature simply amazing? Okay, between you and I, let’s be honest, sometimes there could be even more drag’n'drop everywhere on the Mac.
Maybe the guys from Aptonic had the same thought, more then likeley they just had a brilliant idea and knew how to write software. The outcome of this was: Dropzone. No, not a bad movie about parachutes and jumpers, it’s a simply amazing Mac app.
As the name already reveals, Dropzone acts as a Dropzone that makes it possible to drag and drop stuff onto the app and let it do actions with it and to it. Let’s be more specific, for example, I need to upload files to a FTP server rather often and need the URL afterwards? No problem. Configure a FTP dropzone, drag your file on the Dropzone dock icon and a really beautiful, stacks-like, window pops up, showing me my dropzones. Now I release the file over the FTP action and off it goes. An indicator shows the progress and notifies me in the end that the URL is in my clipboard now. While it uploads I can continue working on other stuff.
Other than FTP, Dropzone allows for Flickr, Twitpic, Imageshack and Dropbox uploads. Furthermore, it let’s you shorten URLs using bitl.ly and is.gd by simply dragging an URL out of your browser onto a destination.
It’s also possible to zip & email files, install applications and much more.
On the aptonic website you’ll find a lot of Dropzone extensions for free and if you know how to write ruby scripts, you can create your own.
For just USD $10 you will get a beautiful and functional application that can help you quite often, by doing small, but sometimes annoying tasks in an easy and attractive manner that will make you smile.
If you head over to aptonic.com you can download a free demo to get the idea for yourself.
Continue reading about Dropzone: The Swiss Army Knife of Drag and Drop
This week we look at MacNerdNews, Dropzone, incoming!, Screensharingmenulet, 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.
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Here is the freeware and shareware I look at during the podcast:
SilverKeeper: http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper
Pixen 3: http://opensword.org/Pixen
iCleanLanguage: (and More) http://rdutoit.home.comcast.net/~rdutoit
QuickTime Player X Pref Pane: http://megabytecomp.com/apps.aspx
Editra: http://editra.org/preview
Allison Sheridan from the NosillaCast Podcast looks at:
Incoming!: http://clickontyler.com/incoming
David Sparks from MacSparky joins us this week and talks about why he loves Snow Leopard:
Tom Piraino from MacinTom.ca and Darren Rolfe from MacWingNut.com joins us for the latest MacNerdNews.
Jeff Powell joins us and talks about:
Hyperspaces – http://hyperspacesapp.com
Song Sergeant – http://www.lairware.com/songsergeant
GelaSkins – http://www.gelaskins.com
Bastian Woelfle from Bitnapping TV joins us to review:
Dropzone: http://www.aptonic.com
Gazmaz Joins us again this week to review:
ScreenSharingMenulet: http://www.klieme.com/ScreenSharingMenulet.html
Try the new ENHANCED version of the MacReviewCast:
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software, review, mac, apple, iTunes, Mac mini, podcast, Macreviewcast, podcasting, maccompanion, OSX, iPhoto, Exposure 2
My Mac set up has been pretty stable for a while now. By that I mean that I haven’t had the need or desire to add any new applications for many months now. The reason is pretty simple; what I have is doing the job that I need doing more than adequately, and I really can’t be bothered to change for changes sake. Incidentally this carries over to Snow Leopard as well, I just can’t be bothered to upgrade 5 Macs that are all working just fine!
The other day though I had a need to create some quick screencasts. I have always liked the idea of screencasts, but never had a need but last week I had a client that was really struggling with some elements of updating their blog, and as they were Spanish and my Spanish is nowhere near good enough to explain Wordpress, I thought that the easiest thing to do would be to screencast the process, and then send it to them using Dropbox (that is another story, but it worked fine in the end).
My weapon of choice to produce the Screencast? Not really tough to guess is it as this is a review of Screenium ($29) from Synium Software. If you ‘Google’ “screencast software for macs” they don’t exactly jump off the page at you, in fact they don’t really appear on the page, but Tim suggested them so I was more than happy to give them a try, and I am very glad that I did!
Quickly make live videos of your Mac’s screen… capture everything that’s happening there, including mouse pointer, selections and movements — in real-time!
As I said above it is a while since I have installed anything new on the Macs so it brought a fond smile of remembrance to this old face at the ease at which the Mac handles an installation. I know, old hat and all that, but sometimes a reminder of the basics is all it takes to remind us why we love the Mac so much!
Once installed I was impressed, but not daunted, by the range of options available. Basically there are four capture modes: Fixed Area, Full Screen, Mouse Area and Single Window, which covered all the bases as far as I was concerned!
As far as the settings go I found these easy enough to understand (important as I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to audio and video stuff)
Video Settings
Audio Settings
Camera Settings
I particularly liked the Activate Camera Capture setting which captures the iSight image at the same time, great for tutorials.
Mouse Settings
The Capture Mouse Pointer is particularly cool!
Example Screencasts
Screencast on how to use the Forum
Screencast on how to leave a Comment
Screencast describing the content and features of the Almerimar Life Site
Key Features
- Full HD Video & higher resolutions
- On the fly Audio recordings
- Capture ‘movie in movie’ for creative tutorials
- Easy to use, clean UI
- Optional time-delayed and time-limited recording
- Asynchronous capturing for enhanced recording quality
Useful Information
You can see a demonstration video here
You can download the application here
Final Thoughts
GREAT value at $29. I am sure that the serious Screencast Guru’s will find shortcomings but I can’t really see what more you would need, especially as other applications can be used to enhance the video. It integrates perfectly with the Mac UI and other applications, is a joy to use, and adds another dimension to the way I use my Mac. Certainly worth a look if you have any need or desire to screencast.
Blurb From The Developers
We made Screenium 1.0 available on October 1st, 2008. Frequent updates with enhancements and feature additions followed, and we’re proud to have received numerous raving reviews over the past months. Screenium well established itself among other peer applications in the dominion of screen capture and screen casting, offering our customers a highly rewarding, yet ever-improving, unparalleled user experience.
Screenium 1.1 premiers a much more powerful capturing engine, with support for reliable, pristine multichannel audio and video from various internal and external sources. We also added configurable visualization for mouse actions, including display of button names. New »Status Indicators« clearly show if Screenium is still recording or if it has been conveniently paused in mid-session. By one look at Screenium’s Dock icon, you’re able to tell if your picture-in-picture recording is actually running fine.
The introduction of version 1.2 marks improvements to the user interface, making Screenium all the more accessible and intuitive to use. While reworking the mouse-based area selection, we added a textual input window for area size and position. Our HotText feature now allows to define the font size as well as font color, position and duration – oh, and the text overlays fade in and out smoothly. The mouse pointer visualization now features a click counter and even shows mouse wheel usage.
Should you miss any particular feature in Screenium, we’re happy to receive comments and suggestions from you, our users. Whenever you wish to contact us with feedback about Screenium, simply drop us a line at
