Picturesque 2

I did a little write-up on an app called Picturesque a while back. Picturesque is basically a lightweight image editor for adding cool effects such as reflection, curvature, and shadows to pictures. A neat way to jazz up your photos for the web. Anyway, it was just updated to version 2 with new 3-D perspective effects, cropping, and presets, plus a nice one window interface and a picture browser. I like the overhaul a lot actually. I griped about the price back then since it cost me $20. Now its $34.95 for a first time license and $12.95 for the upgrade. I still think its a lot for a little utility like this but I realize these independent developers need to make a buck plus I figure they are trying to cash in on that Apple cred after winning an Apple Design Award for best Mac OS X Student product for 2007 last June at WWDC. The app is still one of my favorites to use to add quick effects to photos so I won’t scream about the upgrade price too much but I hope the next version is free. BTW version 2 is a Leopard only app so if you are still running Tiger you are out of luck there.

The iPhone SDK Roadmap

On Thursday Apple unveiled the iPhone SDK roadmap. Since I had some time to kill after a hard days work I checked out the video to see what it was all about. I was honestly excited about this but have to admit that I skipped a little of the video when Scott Forstall started gabbing on about the four architectural layers of the iPhone OS. I found it interesting but I was crunching data all day so I was suffering from info overload already. I was excited about Cocos Touch though for some reason that jumped out at me. Anyway, I’m not a developer but was still excited about what Apple has already done. I kinda wish they had already set up the App Store and made some of those apps they mentioned available for free so we could test them out esp. Spore and Super Monkey Ball they just looked like a fun way to waste some time. I’m looking forward to all the apps that will be ported and somehow wish I could come up with a few myself but I’m not a coder at all maybe its time to learn huh!

Free Apps for Mac OS X

I recently participated in Macheist 2- basically you purchase a bundle of Mac applications for under $50 and 25 % is donated to a charity of your choice. The more apps they sell the more apps they add to the bundle. This year there were 14 apps and although I already owned three of them in the bundle , I participated anyway since I was interested in a couple of the other apps I didn’t own. However, now I find myself with extra copies of : Pixelmator- an easy to use, fast, image editor, Cha-Ching- a quicken like app that makes budgets, bills and checkbook balancing a fun activity, and AppZapper- The easiest way to uninstall apps from your Mac (this takes care of those associated files scattered around your hard drive). I’ve decided to be charitable and pass these apps on as I’m no longer in need of them. That’s right you can have any of the apps for free just by leaving a comment about anything you like on this blog entry (please refrain from lewd and rude comments). One app per person so please don’t ask for all of them. BTW this should be obvious but you need at least Mac OS 10.4 to run these apps and they are all Leopard (10.5) friendly.

Slainte

Time Machine Scheduler

One of the features of Apple’s new OS Leopard that i like is Time Machine. It is one of the easiest ways to do a backup. However, I’m a bit of a control freak and I don’t like the fact that TM runs every hour. I prefer every 3 hours or so or at least to have the control to specify the frequency of the backups. My external HD is also not a Terabyte like some people’s so I have to be careful not to fill it up to quickly. Although, I think Apple should add the ability to control the TM scheduler for folks like myself who like to tinker, someone from the Mac community has stepped up to the challenge and provided a free program call “TimeMachineScheduler” that allows you to set the backup interval of TM from 1-12 hours. You can also run backups on load and a few other things.

Customizing Leopard Updated

OK so since I made the switch to Leopard I was having some trouble with the default icons. It was a bit too cartoonish for my taste so I went looking for ways to customize them. The best thing out there on the Mac for this type of thing is CandyBar but CandyBar was not compatible with Leopard until yesterday. CandyBar was finally updated to version 3 and is now Leopard compatible. I hopped on over there and took it for a spin and now my icons are the way I want them to be. The only thing was that the CandyBar upgrade is a bit steep at $24. Its like I’m paying for it all over again, not so nice since its and upgrade. However, version 3 does include the ability to change your dock as well as Pixadex for organizing your icons which was a separate product. If you want to customize Leopard for free and save your $24 for something else, you can use PimpMyDock to change your dock backgrounds and indicators (they actually have dock themes on the site that you can download and apply). To change your icons similar to CandyBar use LiteIcon. I haven’t found a way to change application icons using LiteIcon but maybe I’m overlooking something there. For some good wallpapers, themes and icons try these links.

Jonas Rask- good icons

Macthemes 2 Forum

Michael’s Mac- some of everything

Leopard Docks- lots of docks

Changing the Leopard Dock

If you don’t like the color or glossy look of the Apple Leopard dock you can change it. Basically all you have to do is to replace the various “scruve-x.png” files (x is l, m, sm, or xl) in the Dock package’s /Contents/Resources folder (please back up the original files just in case something goes ill). After that open up Terminal and type “killall Dock” at the shell prompt ($) to restart the dock. You can use the current images as a base or try these. Here is a Black glossy one as well Also if you are a fan of the Tiger Triangles try this tip.

Leopard & Transparent Menu Bars

It would seem that there is some sort of odd thing going on with the menu bars in Leopard. Some users are reporting that their menu bar is not as transparent as was promised. That was one of the weirdest things that I noticed after upgrading my menu bar did not seem to change at all. I was a bit concerned that something went wrong but I noticed some transparency in the pull-down menu and a quick look at the Apple support told me that perhaps my graphics card is to blame, although it seem that it is happening on some of the newer systems with newer graphics cards. So is this a bug or just a hardware incompatibility thing? I find it funny coz the transparent menu bar was one of the sticky points of Leopard for a lot of people. I was actually looking forward to it though and feel like I was robbed in some way by not having it. Oh well, guess I can consider myself one of the luck ones and move on to the other exciting features. My initial reaction to Leopard is thank goodness it installed without a hitch (transparent menu or no), I find the new icons kinda cheesy and miss my other ones except that I have to wait for Candy Bar 3 to update those. Time machine is nice and all but it seems to take way too long to backup your system on my PPC Mini it took over 5 hours to do a 20GB backup, not cool this will require me to leave the computer on overnight. Also its a bit harder to tell when a program is open the little blue lights on the transparent dock is just not doing it for me.

Leopard Upgrade

My PPC Mac Mini will be two years old tomorrow. Yes that’s right two years. To celebrate, I decided to go get my hot hands on a copy of Leopard and give it an update. First off I spent some time cleaning off some junk off my system and made sure that my external hard drive had enough space on there to use with Time Machine. My entire iTunes Library is on said external hard drive. After that I cleaned out a bit more junk and burned some files that has just been sitting there to DVD. Next I made sure that App Enhancer was uninstalled off my system since I remember that I was using Clear Docks and Shape Shifter after that I proceeded to backup my files just incase things didn’t go so well. I fired up Super Duper and let it run for a while, it was taking way too long and I was getting impatient so I quit the process and inserted the Leopard DVD. I clicked install and just followed the wizards to upgrade.

I didn’t time it carefully but it took a little over an hour to install on my 1.4 GHz PPC Mac Mini with 1GB RAM. Good thing I had a few things to do around the house otherwise it would have been most annoying to wait that long. BTW the last minute was the longest minute I’ve ever seen. I thought Windows lied to you about minutes… Anyway, all seems to be well and although I haven’t played with it yet I really like what they did with one of the programs that I use the most Preview. Its not a highly talked about feature but I can now crop and resize my photos in previews. The new 3-D doc is interesting, and the balloons are easier to read. I have to go relax now will write more later… think I’ll go check out what they have done to the DVD player app… I’m itching to see LOTR again.

Software

Playin with Pixels

One in a while “my inner child takes over” : ) and I just have to doodle. I usually use pen and ink but was playing with Pixelmator today and decided to test how easy it was to do this in Photoshop vs. Pixelmator. It took me a while to figure out which tools to use in Photoshop and I ended up creating some gosh awful thing that I decided not to bother with at all. It took me a few minutes to do what I was trying to do with Photoshop with Pixelmator (Pixelmator had an upgrade so I decided to install that first). Now I am no Photoshop junkie I’ve always found it a bit cumbersome to use and have shied away from it but I found Pixelmator easy and fun to use… There are tons of features and I don’t have time now to explore them all but overall I was impress with the speed and ease of use. Wish I could get Leopard today to test how fast it loads on there but I’m one of those who live in a place that won’t have it until after today. We don’t have a real Apple store around here bummer.

Free iWeb Templates

If you happen to be one of those folks who uses Apple’s iWeb and has not upgraded to version 2 but is looking to refresh your website with a new template or two then check out these free iwebtemplates did I mention they were free? For now and you can download most of them install and be on your way to creating something exciting. If you are using iWeb 2 and would like some new templates then check out 11mystics. Suzanne’s got some version 1 and version 2 templates as well ($14.95 per template). You can also get iWeb templates for version 1 and version 2 at Lamiavia ( $~14). Enjoy!