function

Apr 27 2009

The best parts of Panther

By: Jon Gales

Now that a good bit of the Mac population has Panther, I thought it would be a good time to go over what I like most about the new OS. If you have a differing opinion, let me know.

TextEdit
Apple didn’t make a new ad campaign centered around TextEdit, but they could have. This little, “application that could”, can now read and write .docs! It also sports cool things like styles. This makes my rare grab for Word, a lot more rare.

Preview
Another one of those little upgrades. Preview can now crop, which is really handy when you just need a quick change and don’t want to fire up Photoshop. It also sports a search function for PDFs. Both very cool. Not really Preview, but the sheer speed of PDF rendering in Panther is great

Application switcher
Yes, I know it wasn’t original, but I like it. Quite handy.

Activity monitor
Again, one of these quite updates. One of the things that bugged me about X was that you could never really tell how much RAM applications were taking up without some weird Terminal tricks or freeware. Is it some sort of secret? Come on Apple.

With the new activity monitor (changed from process viewer), you can not only see RAM usage, but CPU, disk and network usage as well. It really kicks butt, and has some neat graphs that make it look like you’re doing a lot of work when your boss comes in for the 4th time in an hour.

So, do you have some favorites that I didn’t mention? Let me know!

By admin • Articles, Power User Monday Tip of the Week • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

Opera Spotlight

Opera has been around for ages. Thanks to a recent change of heart (or

business model) by the Norwegian software company you can now download and

use the Opera browser free of charge. While previous free versions were

saddled with ads, not Opera sings a different tune.

So, to get in on the fun, run over to

href="http://opera.com/download/index.dml?platform=mac"

target="_blank">Opera.com and download your copy. Not convinced? Check

out the browser’s unique features:

Speed

I’m used to browsing with a tn of extensions loaded in Firefox, so when I

took off with Opera, I was suprised at the speed. I found it even quicker

than Firefox without extensions. That’s saying something, considering that

Opera is loading a mail and newsfeed client as well.

operatoolbar Opera Spotlight

Polished Interface

Opera’s interface sports a great balance of function, simplicity and polish.

Address options emerge only when you click on the web address. Other options

are so well tucked away you forget about them (the mail and chat client –

for example). Everywhere you go in the browser, you find things taking up

the minimal space, and put in just the right place.

operamail Opera Spotlight

The Mail Client

The mail client, complete with IMAP and POP support and spam filtering, is –

you guessed it – fast. The import wizard actually supports Mac Mail clients

including Thunderbird and Mail.app. Contacts are intuitively managed. Both

mail and contacts fit into the main window on tabs.

Customizing Opera

You can tweak everything from your themes and sidebars to menus and mouse

gestures. Opera’s portal also offers a photo album, blog and web-based

email. There’s even a tutorial for making your own theme.

operanotes Opera Spotlight

Odds and Ends

Another thing I liked was the fact that the RSS reader is actually a reader,

not some kind of feed-bookmark thing. I also thought the notes were nice.

Together with “copy to note” and spellcheck Opera could be your next text

editor too.

Gripes

Opera is a lot of fun, but you have to meet a lot of criteria to become my

default browser. For most of my browsing, I’ll have to stick with Firefox,

thanks to extensions and standards support not found in Opera. While Opera

imports all kinds of settings including bookmarks, contacts and mail

accounts, it does not export to any formats besides its own.

The Fat Lady Sings

For many, the new free status of Opera is huge. I have to admit, it is a

superb browsing experience – fast and feature packed. For those not heavily

invested in Firefox add-ons or Safari’s ease, Opera makes a great browsing

choice. Who knows, maybe someday it might make default.

Brian

By admin • Articles, Freeloader Friday Download of the Week • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 27 2009

Two Mac Apps that give your Blog pics more Oomph!

(from Episode #40 of The Lab with Leo Laporte)

Do you have a blog? It seems most people do these days. What about a Flickr account? Or maybe you frequent an online forum or two. If you’re involved in any of these popular online activities, you have probably needed to post an image at one time or another. (I can’t imagine why anyone would have a Flickr account if they had no intention of posting images!) I’m going to show you two Mac applications that simplify the process of creating images for blogs and one that will even help you upload and post the images after they’re created.

PICTURESQUE
First, we’ll start with Picturesque from Aqualia (ah-KWAH-lee-ah). The program’s chief function is resizing and beautifying images for your website. You can add borders, fades, shadows, glows, rounded corners and reflections and adjust each effect to your liking. The interface is very clean and straight forward and it takes all the fiddling out of making your blog graphics consistent. You might even be able to develop a combination of effects that can become your blog’s “look.�

Speaking of a consistent look, Picturesque allows you to batch process a group of images so that they all have the same effects and scaling applied. You can drag multiple images to the Picturesque window and apply the same scaling and beautifications to them all before saving them all out to the desired image format.

SKITCH
Skitch has some of the same features as Picturesque, but not many. Skitch resizes, but not in the same way that you resize in Picturesque. Here all you do is grab the corner of the Skitch window and drag. It looks like you might merely be zooming in, but you are actually scaling. This method makes it difficult to work with images larger than your screen resolution, but if you’re using Skitch for its intended purpose you really wouldn’t be using images that big.

To crop an image, you just drag from the edge of the image inward until you find the cropping you like. Skitch crops in on the image and resizes the Skitch window to accommodate you.

Skitch’s left edge is populated with drawing tools so that you can mark up your images with shapes, lines arrows and text. Embellishments made using Skitch’s drawing tools are movable as individual objects after you draw them and are vector-based so that if you decide to scale the image up after making notations, your drawings will not lose detail or crispness. Skitch even works with WACOM tablets and allows you smooth pressure sensitive drawing.

When you’re done with your image, you can just drag it out to your desktop, to your email client or you can configure Skitch to upload to your web space, Flickr account or Plasq’s own MySkitch service. When you enter in this account information into Skitch’s preferences, you can also ask the program to automatically put the URL, HTML or forum code into your clipboard so that you can immediately go about posting your new image to your blog or that forum you lurk in.

Skitch is integrated with iPhoto, so you can Skitch your latest pictures of your dog. And it even keeps a record of all the images you’ve made, posted, emailed or archived so that you can continue to manage them if you need to.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
Skitch: http://plasq.com/skitch
Picturesque: http://www.acqualia.com/picturesque

PRODUCTS SHOWN
Skitch (Price unknown, public beta available now or very soon)
Picturesque (USD$19.50, free watermarked demo)

By admin • Articles, The Lab with Leo Laporte Segments • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8