It’s that time of year

Tax time usually means that I remember how much I wanted to organize my finances last year. I’ve used a nice little application called iBank from IGG Software. It has suited most of my needs over the past year and is about half the price of Quicken for the Mac. But this year I had the itch to see if I was missing anything by using independent software like iBank. I purchased Quicken 2007 from my local Apple store and got to work moving all my finances over from iBank.

The real drive for me was that Quicken claimed to be able to link up with my accounts online so that I didn’t have to remember to download my transactions. Well, guess what… no program will do that. Quicken does have one nice feature. It will import your bank info from the account activity. This means that if you import your activity from Wells Fargo, Quicken will recognize that the account is with Wells Fargo. It’s not really that big of a deal.

Both programs allow you to reconcile your account during import, both show all your assets and both show how you use your money. I really can not recommend Quicken over iBank. iBank does everything the average home user needs and you’ll keep some money in that bank account.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, puppy, Software

Meander

Remember back in the day when you had to BUY mapping software? I can. I plunked down $30 for some mediocre software that was out of date in a year. Then Mapquest saved us. It brought forward free software to find out where we could go and how to get there. Google has since elevated online maps to an impressive level. There is still a major issue with creating waypoints and paths. Recently I came across a great little app that does this one thing really well. It’s called Meander. The principle is simple. It creates a transparent window that hovers over any map window, be it Google, Mapquest, or Microsoft Live. It can even be a PDF of a map. You set the scale of the map as shown, then draw your path over top of your map. It’s that simple.

What Meander does is create a line drawing (which can be seen with a white background) and measures that line. It’s so simple, it’s amazing.

I find it pretty handy for all kinds of mapping. Scheduling dog walks, bike paths and even some crazy road trips.

Technorati Tags: Map, Apple, Mac, Review, Software

A band-aid for the Finder

Yes, the Finder could be better. I think many of us are hoping that the next OS release brings tabbed finder views and a simple way to deal with moving and viewing files. But until that day comes, there is Pathfinder by Cocoatech (PF4). It’s been touted on 43Folders a couple of times, here and here. Cocoatech have produced a quality product that feels right at home on my desktop. It takes some practice to get used to it though, so I’ll outline some cool features here.

The dropstack is a temporary holding place for files. Think of it as a more useful and forgiving command-select. You just drop files in the square and it keeps track of all of them. Then when you are ready to manipulate the files, you can easily grab each or all of them. YOu can even ctrl-click the stack to compress, burn, or email the lot. I use this for organizing my directories. I just browse through a bunch of folders throwing misplaced files in the dropstack. When I’m ready I just switch to the folder I want them in and unload them all.

There are a huge number of options when working with files. The contextual menu for a single file allows you to do almost anything with it. Pathfinder not only gives you the option to copy the path of a file but it gives you the option of copying the UNIX, HFS, Terminal, URL, or name as a path. Honestly, it’s more than I have use for, but I’m sure some uber power user out there would love this feature.

As far as file paths go, PF4 has multiple optional drawer that you can setup to display the curent file path. As shown below, I also like to keep a folder histroy displayed so I don’t have to keep back tracking to folders that I use regularly. You know, those folders that are good enough for favorites, but you might make a desktop alias to.

The last feature I want to mention is the optional Running Processes tab. It’s kind of like having a mini-dock attached to the window. You can kill a process, switch to an application or bring up a contextual menu with loads more options, such as launching another instance of the application as root.

These are the kind of features that only a dedicated and Apple Fanboy would think about including. I bet the developers at Cocoatech all love their macs and started making great software that they wanted to use. I, for one, am grateful that the mac community is made by companies like Cocoatech

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Review, Software, Tip, Trick

Upload your photos

Now that we all have a bunch of new holiday photos it’s time to get them uploaded to Flickr and other various photo sharing sites. If you’re running either iPhoto or Aperture on the Mac you have limited choices to automate the upload process. I have used the plugin ApertureExport in the past, but to purchase the full version is kind of pricey for a one trick pony. After trying out some of the options out there I’ve finally settled on PictureSync from uVerse. You can upload to just about any service you can think of (check out this list) with tags, descriptions and complete group control. It will even pull in all the metadata from Aperture. PictureSync is free for the casual user but they ask for $15 for heavy users.

One of the coolest features is the Automator like scripting. This allows you setup rules to control how information gets added to the photos during uploads. For example, if you don’t want your keywords from Aperture added to your photos on Flickr, just create a rule that substitutes new keywords to the photo before uploading.

PictureSync is also application aware. It can pull selections directly from Aperture, iPhoto or Adobe Bridge. It’s pretty universal.

A close runner up to PictureSync is 1001 from the makers of Ecto and Endo. I really like this application too. It does far more than upload photos, it’s also a photo stream viewer. Similar to using iPhoto to view photostreams, but 1001 allows you to set the time intervals for checking streams as well. It does a good job, but I just liked PictureSync better.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, iPhoto, Mac, Photography, Review, Software

The easiest way to download Google and Youtube video

A little while ago, I wrote about using Podtube to download flash videos from Youtube. As Youtube pulls more and more videos off, due to complaints from studios like NBC, I enjoy keeping local copies for future viewing. Well, I’m happy to report the easiest way yet to capture these video. VideoDL is web service that simply fetches the flash file and provides you with a simple download link. Just put in the URL from a video that you want to keep. VideoDL produces a link. Click the link and your browser starts the download. From what I can tell it works great with both Google video and Youtube, but not Metacafe (they don’t claim it should).

Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes, Mac, Software, Tip, Trick, Video, Youtube

The easiest way to print a calendar on a Mac

Today I had the need to print out a calendar for my wife. She needed a blank printout to write a schedule to hang on her wall. My first thought was “I think there is a template in Apple’s iWork Pages that could do this.” Well, that was a poor assumption. No such luck. I went to the iWork community site to find a template but nothing was really useful.

Then it hit me! I have iCal. Right there under the file menu I chose print, fully expecting to just get a bland printout of my current view. That’s not the Apple way though. You get a nice print preview and preference panel that allows some great print options. You can select the number of months to print, along with which calendar events to include. Black and white or color? No problem. Even mini-months are included. This is a wonderful surprise built right into iCal.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Software, Tip, Trick

Parallels and Apple — Near perfect

There’s a whole lot of buzz around the latest Parallels beta release. They have added a new feature called “coherence” which allows OSX and Windows to co-mingle on your desktop. At first, this seems wrong and creepy. But once I appreciated what this will mean for the future, I found peace with Windows on my Mac.

Here’s the gist, you can drag documents between the Windows and Mac desktops and folders. Sadly, they do not “move” but simply copy from one environment to the other. Hopefully this will be changed in the near future. That’s not all, with the coherence mode turned on you can also drag an OSX window into the MS Windows desktop environment and copy and paste between applications using the default Apple short cuts. This is nothing short of monumental in the evolution of virtualization on the Mac.

I’m imagining a future where you can right click on a document anywhere and choose to open it in either the windows  or the OSX environments. Or better yet, predefine that certain file types always open in the desired environment. The software will just work. No need to worry about the operating system. Web browsde in linux, rip DVD’s in Windows and take care of photo’s in iLife without ever concerning yourself with which environment is actually running.

I am blessed enough to be running dual monitors. This allows me to dedicate one to the Windows VM on Parallels and one to OSX. I couldn’t ask for a better setup for getting my work done. The coherence mode of Parallels allows me to drag OSX windows into the Microsoft environment with no problems (however, you can not drag Microsoft application windows into the OSX environment). The image below shows Microsoft Media Player 11 running overtop Vienna and iStat (both Mac applications).

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Parallels, Review, Software, Windows

Bring your DVD’s on the plane

I really wanted to bring my DVD’s on a recent cross-country flight. I was familiar with backing them up using a PC, but I had never done it on the Mac. I played around with several options and decided that Handbrake is the best solution if you want a file for your iPod or in iTunes while Mac the ripper is the best if you want a dvd image file at full quality.

You can find a complete description of the process here and here while Macworld also has a nice write up here. This seems pretty satisfying, but I think I would still prefer to remaster the disk like I did on the PC. I was able to strip out the multiple languages, menus and extras to produce a much smaller DVD image that I could load up in any DVD playing software (including windows media center player in the living room ).

Technorati Tags: Aperture, iPod, Mac, Tip, Trick, Video, Windows

Don’t do it!

I tried out a trick making the rounds on many of the Mac news sites. Supposedly, it is possible to enable Apple’s Front Row on the MacPro.

This sounded like a great idea. I’d love use my Mac Pro as a media machine but for some reason Apple chose not to include an IR remote with the Mac Pro. The hack seemed easy enough. Just modify the AppleHIDMouse extension to allow the mighty mouse to control Front Row.  So I backed up my file and applied the hack. I then tried to install Front row from my installer CD but got the usual error. So I downloaded the updated installer from Apple. This time it claimed to install the package, but I couldn’t find the application anywhere on my machine. So, I gave up and pretended nothing happened.

Well, my Mac wasn’t going along with that decision. Within a few hours I was having kernel panics just about every hour. For no particular reason. Sometimes when I was using iTunes. Sometimes in Safari. No specific cause.

I tried to just replace the modified extension and delete the cache files. This, of course, required me to rebuild my privileges as well. No good. I was starting to think that I would have to do a new system install. I finally resorted to running Onyx, restarting, and then running Applejack. Everything seems fine now. No kernel panic for the past hour. I’ve been pushing it with Safari, Aperture, Devonthink, and now Ecto.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Hardware, Mac, OSX, Software, Tip, Trick

Bouncing

This is a little gem from the last Digg videocast. I’ve totally ignored this option in Apple’s Mail application for the past couple of years. You can select a message that is spam and bounce it back to the sender as if your address no longer exists. This is a great way to get off of those spam email lists. If you do this enough times the spammers will conclude that your email address no longer exists.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Tip, Trick

Worth a visit

The new Aperture web site from O’Reily is definitely worth your time. It now includes the great website Aperture tricks.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, Blogs, iPhoto, Mac, Photography, Tip

Image sucking with Automator

Here’s a quick Automator script to pull all of the image links in the frontmost Safari window into iPhoto. I use this when I stumble across a web page with great photos I want to add to my gallery.

Notice that what this script does is download to the desktop and then import to iPhoto. After completion, it deletes the originals from the desktop. This way I am sure to get the full resolution images rather than the lower resolution web thumb nails

Technorati Tags: Apple, Automator, iPhoto, Mac, Productivity, Programming, Tip, Trick

Adding Youtube video to iTunes

Who doesn’t love Youtube (this month)? In fact some of the stuff I like so much that I want to keep it permanently on my computer. While there are applications out there like TubeSock, I think the way I do it provides more options.

I start by grabbing the flash file from Youtube with the free application PodTube. This little utility grabs the flash movie from the frontmost Safari window and loads it onto the desktop. While PodTube has settings to convert the file to an iPod playable format, I have not had any luck getting it to work. However, I am a registered user of Hawkeye. This is a great utility that converts files between a variety of formats. It can convert DVD files to play on iPods!

After Podtube places the flash file on the desktop, just import into Hawkeye and convert to MP4 (or any number of other formats). Hawkeye will even add the file to iTunes for you.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, Mac, OSX, Youtube, Software, Tip, Trick, Video

Feeding the Aperture needs

My Mac Pro received another 1GB RAM upgrade tonight. That puts it at 3GB total. Apple’s Aperture just sucks up the RAM. Especially when dealing with the NEF (RAW) files from the Nikon D80.

The extra RAM has made a considerable difference. Aperture is snappier and I can listen to music while I play with my photos.

Doing a self-install of the RAM was a snap. Here’s the instructions:

1) Power down the Mac Pro

2) Open the side panel

3) Pull out the top RAM riser

4) install two 512K RAM chips (from Apple)

5) Put the memory riser back, close the side panel and power-up

Done.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, Hardware, Mac, Tip

Beyond Onyx

I love the system utility Onyx. I’ve tried most of the others, including MacJanitor and Cocktail, but Onyx has always done a good job and has a great feel to it. Now I’m aware that most of them are simply running a series of unix maintenance commands to repair permissions, clear cache files and update catalogs. But I still find them easier to use than the Unix commands.

I am now an Applejack user. What is Applejack? Well, it’s the uber disk repair script. While it does require a restart into Single user mode, it repairs way more than just the permissions. Too much to list here, but check out the link I provided. One of the big features is repairing bad bits on a drive. If you feel like your mac has been crashing more often than it should, the disk could be corrupted. Applejack will take care of that. It also cleans up virtual memory catalog structures.

Be careful though, Single user mode is quite powerful. I would recommend reading up on it before you try it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Review, Software, Tip

iStat

Now that I am all about digital photography (at least this week) I’ve noticed some limitation of having only 2GB of RAM. If anything will tax your system, be it PC or Mac, it is digital media. Aperture really puts some serious load on my Mac Pro. I wanted to see exactly how much.

Introducing iStat. It’s a great little application (donation ware) that comes in either Widget or application flavors. It shows about everything you would want to know (except individual cpu load on the dual intel machines). You get CPU load, Memory usage, Disk usage, Network ID and transmit receive stats as well as up time. I highly recommend it.

Here’s the load on my Mac Pro with Diggnation playing in a full screen window on a second monitor while using Safari and Mail

And here is the same machine running Aperture ONLY

I was a little surprised that Aperture didn’t use more resources. Granted, I wasn’t editing photos, I was just viewing them in the Aperture browser. Still, I’m asking Santa for another 1GB of Ram for my system.

Note: I realize that the images are not showing up right now. I’m investigating the sources right now and hope to have everything fixed soon.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, iPhoto, Mac, Nikon, OSX, Photography, Review, Software

Apple in the RAW

It’s no secret that OS X is way ahead of Microsoft Vista. One example is the Core image built into OS X. One of the advantages of having image support built into the OS is that you can handle large image files with less strain on the cpu and memory. It also ensures that the user experience is consistent across multiple applications. I’m no expert, but there is a reason many graphics professionals choose the Apple platform.

An example of this is the way OS X deals with RAW photo files. All of the work is handled at the OS level rather than each application interpreting the data separately. This can be a really great experience unless you have a brand spanking new DSLR. When Nikon introduced the new D80 and Canon let loose with the xti digital rebel I was ecstatic. However, I soon started reading reports that the RAW files were not compatible with the my shiny new Mac Pro. In fact no application on the Mac could open the new file formats since this is an OS level activity. What a disappointment. I certainly didn’t want to wait for the next OS iteration to include new RAW support. Then I found this release from Apple.

Apple quietly to the rescue again. They released an update just to handle the new camera formats. But why is this not just available in the software updates? It’s hard to complain, considering that Microsoft doesn’t even provide vulnerability patches this quickly. I guess I just expect more from Apple.

This update allows iPhoto and all other Mac applications to handle RAW file formats from the latest Canon, Nikon and Pentax DSLR’s.  Couple this with a 30 day free trial of Aperture, and I’m in SLR heaven.

Note: Apple keeps moving the installers. Here are both versions

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhoto, Mac, OSX, Photography, Software

Voyeurs everywhere rejoice

I have a rather long intro for today’s software review, but hang in there. Alternatively, you can just skip to the section labeled “Review:” and ignore my theories altogether.

I look back at the first half this decade as the age of digital music. MP3 players came into wide spread use, music file sharing exploded, and iTunes was born. From that period forward, music has become a more integral part of my life. I can listen to it just about anywhere I choose.

Next came the podcast which did the same for talk radio. We can now be exposed to a limitless number of opinions and viewpoints.

Now, this second half of 2000 is shaping up to be all about images. More people than ever have digital cameras with features that can turn anyone into a semi-pro (or Prosumer as I’ve heard it called). Even Grandma can now take RAW photos like a pro.

Applications like Photoshop (still not a Universal app) and Gimp give anyone the ability to correct and manipulate images while iPhoto gives us instant access to our ever expanding library of digital images. More recently, sites like flikr, Google images and Photobucket have sprung up to allow us to share our work with the entire planet. It’s really hard to imagine the impact it might have when someone from Beijing China can check out the vacation photos of a New Yorker or vice versa. The internet is now enabling people to move beyond file sharing into experience sharing. Youtube will most probably continue down this path.

Review:

Flikr is great for sharing your photos, but what I like best about it is the ability to peruse the photos of people I have never met. There are some stunning photos out there. The problem with most photo sharing sites is that the display is pretty clunky and makes the experience rather dry. Not anymore. Now we have PicLens to blend the experience in a way that Mac users have become accustomed to. The usage is very simple. PicLens is not an application, but rather a Safari plugin. After installing the plugin and restarting Safari, you can navigate to a Flikr set (I chose this one discussed around the web this weekend) and PicLens finds all the photos and preloads them all.

If you hover over an image, you get an icon in the lower left corner as shown here:

When you click the icon PicLens takes over and loads up a gorgeous full screen viewer with a preview ribbon below. Menu appear and disappear elegantly and the entire experience rivals any sophisticated photo catalog application out there. I’m simply in love with this Safari addition. Apple could learn something here.

PicLens is brought to you by Cooliris, the makers of a Safari plugin by the same name (also available for Firefox and Internet Explorer). The Cooliris plugin provides a preview of link URL’s without having to click through. I’ve never found much use for the Cooliris plugin but PicLens is a homerun.

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Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iTunes, Mac, Music, OSX, Photography, iPhoto, Software

Let the covers flow again

When Apple bought Coverflow to include in iTunes 7, I was both happy and sad. At first I was happy that iTunes finally had a nice interface for my album art. Sadly, Coverflow was no longer available (or so I thought). Coverflow downloaded album art from Amazon while iTunes uses the iTunes store (makes sense). I have some unusual CD’s which iTunes just ignores the cover art for while Coverflow happily found.

Fret not art lovers! Coverflow can still be found at MacUpdate. Just a quick download and your back to the good old days of August 2006.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iTunes, Mac, Music, Software, Tip

Media format armistice

Is there really any reason to have so many different media formats? WMV, mpeg4, QT, FLV… the list goes on. While Quicktime handles many of the most popular formats, there are still plenty that it doesn’t and that really gets frustrating. Sure, I have VLC running on my Mac Pro, but it is far from a finished product. Why can’t Apple just finish the supported format list for Quicktime? I even upgraded to Quicktime Pro to get some extra formats (like Mpeg2).

Recently I found a plugin for Quicktime that allows it to handle many more formats. I was looking to play some flash FLV files and VLC was giving multiple errors. After downloading and installing the Perian plugin, my dream came true. Here is a list of the supported formats:

Divx, XviD, FLV, AVI, MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, 3ivX, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, Truemotion VP6

These formats when they are inside an AVI: h.264, mpeg4, AAC, AC3 Audio, and VBR MP3.

Wow! And it plays FLV files better than VLC. It still makes me wonder what is up with WMV format. I really hate using Flip4Mac just to play WMV files. Why can’t Apple just license the format from MS and include it in QT? MS isn’t even making media software for the Mac anymore.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Video, Software, Tip