upload

Aug 9 2010

The pursuit of Mac Awesomeness

I’ve been thinking of doing quick-and-dirty videos to accompany the stories here at MacMerc for quite a while but the first video is always the toughest. I finally got my inspiration as I was sitting in the local @Starbucks trying to post a story using their free wifi. It was taking me far too long to upload a simple story. Far, far, far too long. This was not going to work.

I looked across the street and noticed my local Mac dealer, Mac Station, and thought, “I bet they have better wifi… I wonder if they’d let me blog from their store.” I assumed they’d want to get something out of the deal—not just let some guy leach wifi and not buy anything. That’s when I came up with the idea to offer to do those nearly-daily videos I wanted to do, but do them from their store. I help get the word out about the awesome store and their fun, knowledgeable staff and in return I get a base to blog from and a gentle nudge to get something compelling done every day.

So here it is, the first video1 . The first video is always the toughest.

No Flash? No problem—click here!»

Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and follow @RickMacMerc and @MacMerc on Twitter. Me and the staff here at Mac Station have a lot of great ideas we’re going to share with you, but if you know of any Mac/iPod/iPhone/iPad awesomeness you want us to feature, post a comment or send me a Submission of Awesomeness and I’ll give it a look.

Thanks for reading this far, as a reward, you get to watch a video of me rescuing a kitten from my car engine»
  1. and, no, this doesn’t take the place of MacMercTV [↩]

This also happened today…

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Apr 27 2009

Mac Only Freeware

We all love to see our machine of choice get more powerful, so why not be glad that Intel Macs can run native Windows? But lets not get too carried away. After all, we all know half of what we love about our Macs is the operating system. And while you’re in Aqua or Brushed Metal Nirvana, you can enjoy the following free applications knowing they’re only for the Mac.

applesm Mac Only FreewareAdium

Adium is the Appled version of Gaim, the Open Source mutli-protocol chat application. Adium sports Aqua polish and Mac only features over the top of Gaim’s evolving chat engine. Adium is also backed by a strong community and a slew of add-ons. Last week we covered Adium’s VoIP prowess via the Gizmo Project plugin. There’s even a portable version that runs on removable memory.

applesm Mac Only FreewareCamino

Recently hitting its 1.0 milestone, this Mozilla browser has OS X finesse. The Gecko rendering engine gives you a well supported alternative to WebKit and integrates with OS features like Bonjour, Key Chain, Address Book and Spotlight. Camino is fast and stable and includes powerful ad-blocking features built in.

camino Mac Only Freeware

Camino is also supported by an active community and includes cutting-edge features like Instant Back and Forward, bookmark search and pausing downloads.

applesm Mac Only FreewareCreammonkey

Still Safari-faithful? Then we have something for you to add one of Firefox’s most powerful features to OS X’s built in browser. Creammonkey introduces user script support to Safari. With this plugin, you can install and browse with user scripts – tiny JavaScript webpage enhancers. Because Safari’s Javascript and rendering are different than Firefox, not all scripts will work.

applesm Mac Only FreewareGrowl

We’ve referenced this system utility before, and its time it got a proper introduction. The Growl project introduces a system-level notification engine. Applications like Adium, Skype and many others support Growl for notification windows.

growl Mac Only Freeware

The appearance settings are highly configurable. Notifications can be read or emailed to you. Plugins add to the functionality (including notification of hot-swapped hardware) and window styles. Growl is also supported by a user community.

applesm Mac Only FreewareImageWell

This tiny app is a powerful graphics tool. There’s no point in launching Photoshop and Fetch when all you want to do is crop, scale and upload an image. This can all be done in this tiny graphics utility.

imagewell2 Mac Only Freeware

Whats more, ImageWell supports annotation (think dialog bubbles) borders, watermark and drop shadow effects. And, when you are done ImageWell will upload the image with the touch of a button.

Happy 30th to Apple. Three decades and still the coolest in tech.

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)

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