mac apps

Oct 25 2010

Bodega: The Mac Apps Store for the rest of us

featured 318x122 Bodega: The Mac Apps Store for the rest of us

If you were watching the “Back to the Mac” presentation by Steve Jobs1last week, you heard about the upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and the announcement of a Mac Apps Store. Jobs suggested that people like the iPhone Apps Store and how it’s so easy to find new software and buy it all from one place. And he’s right.

But what people don’t like is Apple restricting their access to the applications with the functions they want and refusing developers who don’t create applications that are in keeping with what Apple wants for its hardware.

People might want an application store for Macs, but they may not like Apple being the go-between in their search.

The funny thing is, we’ve had an Macintosh applications store available to us for some time. It’s called Bodega and it has been brought to you by Fresh Code. Bodega offers a great selection of applications and, when you choose to make your purchase, you’re directed right back to the developer who created it. All of your application (all of them, not just the ones purchased through Bodega) are listed in the Applications section of Bodega from which you can see if you have any updates to apply—you can even revisit your receipts and serial numbers there.

This free application serves to fill the need for a Mac Apps Store and it’s available for free right now for Snow Leopard.

Bodega: The Mac Apps Store for the rest of us
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By RickMacMerc • announcement, apple, Featured, MacMerc.TV, Mini Video, osx, RickMacMerc, shareware, softwareupdates • 4 • 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: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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