mac applications

Apr 27 2009

Online Office

Contacts, calendars and tasks lists are great, if you have your Mac handy. But if you’re on the move, and on other computers during the day, how to you keep things in sync?

By moving your information online, you’ll get universal access to your data. With today’s picks you’ll also be able to sync your info back into your Mac applications.

This week’s picks are all PHP/MySQL web-based applications, so to take advantage of them you’ll need hosting that supports these. If you’re looking, consider 1&1, A Small Orange, Dreamhost or Pair.

The Address Book

This online contacts solution offers the speed of MySQL to the convenience of vCard portability. The Address Book easily manages many contacts, and exports easily to many formats including vCard, so you can bring your web-based contacts right back into OS X’s Address Book.

theaddressbook Online Office

Multiple user support and authentication allow you to share your contacts with only the people you want to. Unfortunately there isn’t upload support for vCards, but if you’re interested in a four step conversion (requiring Address Book Exporter, Excel and phpMyAdmin) contact me at brian AT macmerc DOT com and I’ll send you the details.

VTCalendar

This gem comes courtesy of Virginia Tech. With VTCalendar you can manage your calendar on your own server. You can even divide your calendar into sub calendars by category and subscribe to your calendar(s) via iCal.

vcalendar Online Office

A handy JavaScript pop-up calendar (for choosing dates) and internal authentication make this an easy-to-use and powerful calendar system.

Tasks Jr

Tasks Jr is a free version of Alex King’s Tasks web-based task manager. While it doesn’t have the advanced features of Tasks, it is more than robust enough for most of us.

tasksjr Online Office

Tasks Jr manages your task online with priority and % complete tracking. Better still, it provides a calendar of your tasks (both scheduled and unscheduled) which you can subscribe to and view right in iCal. Hierarchal organization and a PDA/Mobile friendly interface don’t hurt either.

That wraps up out quest to move our personal information to the web, while keeping in within the reach of your Address Book and iCal. Now, don’t forget to back up those databases!

For those of you without PHP/MySQL hosting (come on, it’s cheaper than .Mac!) stay tuned for a future episode where we’ll look at similar solutions hosted by 3rd party service providers.

Until then, keep it free…

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: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 6 2009

One day left to grab the MacHeist 3 Bundle. 14 Mac Apps for $39

MacHeistBundle 20090406 193757 One day left to grab the MacHeist 3 Bundle. 14 Mac Apps for $39

The controversial MacHeist 3 is coming to a close. It began, as it always does, with a series of secret agent-style missions that end in the reward of free Mac applications.

After the missions were completed, the 12 app bundle was announced–iSale, Picturesque, SousChef, World of Goo, PhoneView, LittleSnapper, Acorn, Kinemac, WireTap Studio, BoinxTV, The Hit List, and Espresso all for USD$39.

Since the then, there have been two bonus apps added (Cro-Mag Ralley and Times). Two more applications are available to those who have purchased and participate in the Tweetblast–they will receive Delicious Library 2 and Multiwinia.

All this is coming to a close in the next day or so, when the MacHeist 3 promotion ends. So far over $600,000 has been raised for charity through sales of the bundle. If you haven’t picked yours up, you’d better hurry.

Note:

By admin • General News, News, shareware • Comments Off • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1 2