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 I plunked down $30 for some mediocre software that was out of date in a year.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 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

Sync two macs at home

Thanks to Apple’s aggressive release cycle, many Mac owners have a couple of different machines sitting at home. My particular setup is a Mac Pro in the study and an older 17″ Powerbook in the living room. You would think that this would be ideal. I have a powerful workstation for Aperture and a nice portable for couch surfing. But, eventually you realize that there is a fly in the ointment. Many items only exist on one machine or the other. Apple’s “Sync” utility does work great with a dot mac account. But their Backup application just doesn’t work very well. Sure, all of my bookmarks, contacts, and keychains are all in sync between the two machines, but it just doesn’t handle large data backups very well. Today I was just thinking, “wouldn’t it be great if I could do the same with all of my other documents?” Then I suddenly realized I own the must have application Chronosync by Econ technologies. This application is one of those little gems that just works well.

What it does

It can synchronize two directions, archive deleted files, and even email a log file to you when it’s all done. I’ve been using it for about a year now for nightly backups to an external drive and it works great. As the name implies, Chronosync has a built in scheduler that will run any script at a predetermined time. It only syncs files that have been modified, so it saves time and drive space.

How to do it

Here’s a brief breakdown of how to setup Chronosync to keep two machines up to date. There are some particular caveats that I will emphasize to keep from screwing up either machine.

Mount the remote machine (in this case it is my laptop). The first time you run the script, choose “Left to Right” sync. I am starting with the idea that my desktop has all of the master documents and I want to do an initial sync to replicate everything to my laptop. After the intial sync, you’ll want to setup two way syncing to keep both machines identical. The instructions that follow will outline bidirectional syncing since it is slightly more complicated.

I find it easier to use a series of Chronosync scripts to sync specific items rather than just doing a sync of the two home folders. While my Mac Pro has 750GB of drive space, my poor Powerbook only has 120GB (upgraded myself). I don’t want to run out of space on my portable. Also, the iPhoto and iTunes libraries are handled very sepcifically. I only sync those one way (from the desktop to the laptop). Make sure to read the Macworld article about using multiple libraries.

I create a new Chronosync script and set the left source as my “documents” folder on  my desktop and the right source as the documents folder on my laptop. Now choose “options” so that Chronosync can auto-mount the remote machine when it is time for the scheduled backup to occur.

Choose bidirectional sync and check the “Synchronize Deletions” box. I save deletions to an archive which I will go through and remove periodically. This is a nice safe guard to prevent accidental deletions on both machines.

We’re going to be pretty general with the sync triggers. If any of these attributes are different between two files, Chronosync will copy the new version. See the image below for the specific settings I use

Chronosync has many individual settings for each sync. I will just briefly outline my settings in the images below. In Error handling, I set “Ignore extended attributes and access control errors.”

Setup the email notification so that any errors are identified.

I don’t bother with the rule based sync because I want to capture all changed files.

That’s it

Just go try Chronosync. It’s a great application that gets the job done. It has just enough complexity to solve most archival needs but not so much that it is impossible to get anything done.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Productivity, Review, Security, Software

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

The wonders of Apple Hardware Test and Console

It seems that Disk Warrior is not going forward to support Intel macs. It’s pretty disappointing because I was a big fan of this software for the PPC macs. Unlike the Windows world, there are few system diagnostic tools for the mac. Maybe that’s because there are fewer issues with incompatible third party hardware. However, sh*t happens and sometimes you need more than Apple’s disk utility program to figure it out.

As I mentioned previously, I had some serious issues with kernel panics on my Mac Pro. Coincidentally I had installed a third set of 512MB ram cards just a few days earlier, bringing me to a grand total of 3GB (Aperture is finally feeling a little more peppy). I was concerned that the new chip was the origin of my problems.

Luckily, Apple includes a Hardware Test application on my system install CD. I only had to restart my machine with the “D” key held down. The Mac Pro booted right into a diagnostics program. Ran the extended diagnostics which took about 12 minutes. It tests the RAM, CPU and motherboard. It also provides some info about the machine.

Since it is not possible to do a screen capture from the hardware test, I’ve added a link to a larger camera shot.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Hardware, Mac, OSX, trouble shooting, Software, 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

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

Fun with Aperture

The new D80 has kept me pretty busy. This is my first “Pro-sumer” camera. I’ve never even focused a camera my self let alone adjust the f-stop and shutter speed. It’s all quite interesting. I rely heavily on Wikipedia and the Nikon user groups for help.

But when it comes to the processing side, I’ve taken full advantage of the 30 day trial of Aperture. After playing around with it for a week or so, I can say that it is far superior to iPhoto, but you will pay the learning curve tax. You not only need to be committed to the $300 price tag, but also to the time commitment to really take advantage of the features. Aperture adds many more options for controlling metadata. In fact, there is more metadata than the casual photography could really use. After all, it’s really meant for photographers that want to know what f-stop and ISO the photo was taken with.

The photo editing tools are not a replacement for Adobe photoshop but they are quite advanced. Once again, Apple has integrated elegance into the user experience. The Loupe is a magnifier that allows you to fluidly move across photos to check for imperfections. The red-eye reduction is easy to use and very effective as well.

Even though Aperture is aimed at the advanced user Apple has included a plugin architecture that allows third party tricks for amateurish tricks such as a Flickr plugin for Aperture (there is also one for iPhoto). Apple finally got it right. Third party plugins!!!! Why not let someone else finish the product for you? The Flickr plugin is still beta and managed to crash Aperture a couple of times. But for the most part it worked as I had hoped. I selected a photo and chose Export to Flickr. The plugin provided a screen to input a title, description, tags and even let me choose the image size. Everything I could need.

My final analysis is that Aperture is good but I’m still not ready to part with $300 for Aperture when iPhoto can now handle RAW photos for the D80.

Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple, iPhoto, Mac, Nikon, OSX, Photography, 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

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

More keyboard surfing

Just a quick link today. This one is for the list of keyboard shortcuts from Apple. It’s really meant to discourage programmers from using these standard key combos for their applications.

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

Better Mail

Simplicity is the Apple way. Sometimes that comes with a shorter feature list. Apple’s Mail is a good example. Even your grandmother could use it with little or no help, but that is partly because it has so few features. Just try to get granny to have a go around with MS Entourage. Luckily, there are more than a few Mail users out there that have cobbled together some of the most asked for features in the form of add-ons and Scripts.

There’s a nice repository of add ons for Apple Mail that catalogs some older additions and scripts as well as a more up to date list at Hawkwings that is more comprehensive.

There’s not many that I have found useful for Mail but the Google Maps plugin and GoogleFill for reverse address lookup are both handy additions for Address Book.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Applescript, Mac, OSX, Productivity, Tip

The best (and worst) of both worlds

The latest revision of Parallels Desktop for the Mac is running butter smooth on my Mac Pro with 2GB of RAM. No hangs or crashes. In fact, right now, I’m using Ecto for Mac to write this post while watching DL.TV Episode 100 and installing software updates on Windows XP.

To be more specific, the update is for my Sandisk 4GB flash drive. I can’t recommend this drive enough. It is fast, small and holds a ton of data. It also came with U3 Cruzer security software that allows me to carry sensitive data from my day job home totally encrypted. The down side is that the software is Windows only. But now that I have Parallels on my Mac, I have access to the secure data any time I want. While getting the Cruzer software installed and running under Windows was pretty quick, the Windows update that I performed on my system was another story entirely.

Check out the number of updates in this set. 59!!! Has Apple even had 59 updates ever? This seems pretty crazy, but I went ahead with the updates. I don’t want to get any of the Windows nasty little bugs in my Parallels install.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Parallels, Security, Windows

Mac Tips – Load music with Quicksilver

Here’s a simple use for Quicksilver. Create a new trigger with the first pane set to your music library. Set the second pane to “Search Contents” and now you can load any song while working in any application. Shouldn’t iTunes come with this feature built in?

Update:

Another way to do this is with the iTunes plugin for Quicksilver. Invoke QS and start typing “iTunes”, then right arrow in to see a list available options like browsing artists, tracks, genre etc. This is a pretty nice interface as well.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Quicksilver, Tip, Trick

10.4.8 Goodness

Those busy little coders over at Apple have whipped up an update for Tiger. That puts it at 10.4.8 for those that aren’t keeping count. They are still giving us sweet lovin’ even when the Leopard release is just around the corner.

I was reading through the release notes to see what to expect and came across this:

Resolves performance issues that could occur when connecting to a Comcast network.

Wow, and I just thought that Comcast was screwing my bandwith with packet shaping. I would say thanks for fixing this, but I haven’t noticed any difference in my internet speeds.

So far, it all seems pretty much the same. I still appreciate the effort. It’s way better than having to install security patches every tuesday. Just think how much better Windows would be if Microsoft didn’t have to spend all of their time making security patches.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, OSX, Tiger, Software