New AP Grapher

New version 1.1 of AP Grapher is now available.

bookit 3.7.1 Review

There are many decent web browsers for Mac OS X such as OmniWeb (see review), Safari, FireFox, Camino, and Opera. Each browser offers a slightly different feature set and as expected, some browsers perform certain tasks better than others. As a result, it is often desirable to move between browsers on a daily basis; e.g., you may use OmniWeb most of the time, but Safari for a few pages, and FireFox for some others. Having your bookmarks remain consistent between all your browsers is virtually impossible to achieve by hand since there are several file formats in use - that's where a tool such as bookit steps up to the plate.

Bookit merges all your bookmarks and allows you to manage them within its interface and sync them with all your browsers. Alternately, if you have one master browser which you use most of the time and manage your bookmarks with, bookit will read them in and allow you to overwrite the bookmarks of your other browsers with the master browser's bookmarks. Other features include an optional global bookmarks menu extra and dock menu. Nearly every web browser for OS X is supported.

• By everyday software.
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AP Grapher and MacBooks

A few people with MacBooks and MacBook Pros (especially Core 2 Duo's) have reported problems with the scanner window of the new AP Grapher 1.0. A new version which addresses these issues and adds many more features is imminent; stay tuned.

svnX 0.9.9 Review

Freeware svnX is a front end to the popular Subversion version control system. Although Xcode has built in support for svn, third party tools such as svnX offer more flexibility and support a wider range of Subversion commands. With svnX, you can manage all of your version controlled projects and repositories in the same GUI environment. Tasks such as tagging, rearranging your repository, removing files, browsing, and committing changes are easy to accomplish. Although svnX feels a little rough around the edges, it has been progressing nicely and makes a worthy companion to Xcode or whatever program you're using to edit version controlled files.

• By la chase interactive.
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AP Grapher Universal

The new universal binary version of AP Grapher has been released. It took a bit longer than expected, but this version is a huge upgrade from the old one and should be rock-solid. Check it out!

PowerMail 5.5.2 Review

PowerMail is an IMAP and POP capable e-mail client which features blazingly fast and easy to use search thanks to homegrown "FoxTrot" search technology. Searching by content through the author's entire email database of tens of thousands of emails using PowerMail takes less than one second! The search function has plenty of options to help narrow down your search, it's fast, and results appear in a separate window for each query. No longer will you be afraid to look at other messages lest you lose your search results.

PowerMail also features SpamSieve integration (see review), syncing with Address Book, multiple accounts, text clippings, location specific server settings, Spotlight integration, and a built in HTML reader. It should be noted that PowerMail doesn't feel quite as refined as Apple's Mail and its handling of picture attachments and HTML email is not as smooth or seamless. However, it's a worthy client and one you should seriously consider if you are fed up with your current choice or just ready for a change.

• By CTM Development.
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MacTracker 4.1b2 Review

MacTracker is an incredibly useful application which tracks the technical specifications of every Macintosh ever produced (including clones) as well as most other Apple hardware such as iPods, displays, and AirPort Base Stations. The hundreds of details available are very specific and even include an area for keeping your own notes and comments. Although similar information is available on Apple's web site for current products, it can often be difficult to locate for out of date machines. MacTracker makes it quick and easy to look up the details on nearly any Apple product you can think of.

Great for researching possible upgrades to your system, troubleshooting, or simply amazing yourself with the fast pace of technological innovation. Other features of note include an iPod version (via the notes feature), timeline by year of models produced, indication of Apple support status for each model, and links to firmware updates for relevant machines. This product would come in handy in any situation where multiple Mac models have to be supported, e.g., at a business or school.

• By Ian Page.
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LaCie Portable Hard Drive Review

This LaCie 100GB portable FireWire and USB 2.0 hard drive is designed by Porsche and serves as an ideal backup companion for your lonely PowerBook or MacBook Pro. (It also gets along with iBooks and MacBooks, but the metal styling doesn't match as well.)

Available sizes range from 60 to 160 GB and the drive is bus powered via the FireWire or USB port on your Mac laptop which solves the annoyance of having to plug in a separate power cable. Unlike some other tested drives, this one is able to draw enough power from even the pickiest Apple laptops which often provide no more current than the exact bus specification (which some drive manufacturers don't follow very carefully). In the unlikely case that your laptop doesn't provide enough bus power, this drive can even draw juice from both the FireWire and USB ports simultaneously via an included cable.

The drive is stylish, small, solidly built, fast, quiet, and works flawlessly with Macs. It comes with a soft drawstring case and thoughtfully short FireWire and USB cables. Note that you should use Disk Utility (in your Utilities folder) to reformat the drive as an HFS plus volume (Mac OS Extended) before using it for optimum Mac compatibility. If you need to exchange data with Windows users, leave it with the default format.

• By LaCie.
• buy
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SpamSieve 2.4.4 Review

Adds bayesian spam filtering to most popular email clients including Apple Mail, Emailer, Entourage, Eudora, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, and PowerMail (see review). The author has used SpamSieve for several years and has achieved a 98.6% accuracy score out of 91,348 emails processed. From personal experience, it appears to work better than Apple's own spam filter in Mail. SpamSieve offers a great deal of customizability and even allows you to view the corpus of words which it uses to calculate spam scores. Integration with clients such as PowerMail is seamless via AppleScript.

• By c-command.
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AP Grapher

A new universal binary version of AP Grapher with several other enhancements is in the works and should be released in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

New Capture Me Released

A new version of Capture Me has been released. This version features a French translation by Antoine of the Mac-Vidéo forum and a Dutch translation by Alexander Henket! Thanks!

OmniDiskSweeper 1.5 Review

Find your hard drive filling up? OmniDiskSweeper can help. This handy little utility scans your drive and hierarchically sorts every file and folder by size - even the invisible ones. This is very handy for finding those huge cache files or old applications, movies, and music that you forgot about. The demo still sorts all your files but forces you to go to the Finder or use the Terminal to delete them manually. Pay the small fee for this software and you gain the ability to delete unwanted files directly within DiskSweeper.

• By The Omni Group.
• download (demo)
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OmniWeb Sale

The OmniGroup is having a November sale on OmniWeb for only $10 instead of the usual $30. This is a great deal on a great web browser which is reviewed here.

Dvorak Layout

New page about using the Dvorak keyboard layout on Mac OS X is now live. Check it out.

ExifRenamer 2.0.1 Review

Although this program does only one thing, it does it well and still functions normally on modern OS X systems even though it was last updated in 2002. Drag a folder of pictures onto ExifRenamer and it will do exactly what its name suggests: rename them based upon their EXIF metadata tags which are embedded in the files by the camera. The way it renames files is very customizable with regard to what date and time formats are used and how to handle duplicate photos taken in the same second. Now, rather than having your digital photos labeled like "DCM_015.jpg" you can have something more meaningful like "2006-10-30 12.23.35.jpg" which shows both the time and date in one glance.

To make using ExifRenamer truly seamless, set ImageCapture (in your Applications folder) to run ExifRenamer as its "Automatic Task" which occurs after downloading. Of course, if you use iPhoto or Aperture (review), this program probably won't be much use to you; but if you like to manage your photos by hand and use something like GraphicConverter (review), then this program will be a welcome addition to your workflow.

• By Stefan Robl.
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Control Scroll Zoom Review

Not exactly a software review, but this new trick is so exciting and useful it was just pleading to be mentioned! On Mac OS X 10.4.8 or later (and possibly earlier?), hold down the control key on your keyboard and scroll to zoom the entire screen in and out! This works on recent PowerBook, iBook, MacBook, and MacBook Pro trackpads which support scrolling, or on any other Mac with a scroll wheel (or ball) enabled mouse. Similar functionality has been available for quite some time by turning zoom on in the Universal Access system preference pane and using ⌘⌥+ and - (option command plus and minus), but the scroll wheel method is much smoother and more convenient to use. Turning zoom on or off in this preference doesn't seem to have any effect on whether or not the new scroll zooming works.

• By Apple, Inc.
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New Capture Me Released

New version of Capture Me is available. This version adds some more options for resizing and moving the capture window.

Google Notifier 1.9.90 Review

It's encouraging to see Google expanding their Mac software offerings with Google Notifier. Notifier lives in the menu bar and provides notifications of incoming Gmail and Google Calendar events. As email arrives, a black translucent window appears with a summary of the message; it automatically fades after a delay or when clicked upon. In addition to mail, Google Calendar events can now get your attention more readily by playing a sound and popping up on your screen. The menus also provide a summary of recent mail and upcoming events including links to the appropriate Google pages.

Unfortunately, the app is not without its quirks. First of all, rather than being a "real" menu extra, Notifier is actually a normal application located in the Applications folder. This means it doesn't behave as other menu extras do - e.g., ⌘ (command) clicking and dragging the icon doesn't allow repositioning or deletion as it does with other menu extras. The colorful icons are also against Apple's standard menu shades of grey, and a little too big - hence they look slightly out of place.

Notifier checks for updates every minute, but this setting is not customizable in the preferences. When waking the computer from sleep, it often checks before the internet connection is fully active and annoyingly reports an error condition in its menu icon.

Even given the flaws, this program is a good start and worth taking a look at if you use Gmail or Google Calendar. Things can only get better from here.

• By Google.
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CSS Redesigns

Many page redesigns for Chimoosoft.com with improved CSS thanks to the excellent book CSS: The Missing Manualby David Sawyer McFarland. After reading this book, it's amazing to think that people still willingly use Internet Explorer; IE is so badly written that the CSS book mentioned an IE rendering bug nearly every other page! Mentioned bugs for all other web browsers combined probably totaled about 3 times in the entire book. Thus, if you're viewing this page using IE 6 or earlier, do yourself a favor and download a nice free standards compliant browser like Firefox or Opera.

Full Key Codes 1.1 Review

A useful program for software developers, but the casual user won't find much to use it for. Extremely simple and to the point - this program displays characters as they are typed along with their key codes in hex, dec, and the ASCII number. Lower rating due to the 'unmacness' of an empty File menu and grayed out Preferences which don't work, but the app itself still gets the job done. A Windows version is available as well.

• By Denis Bajram.
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LaunchBar 4.1.1 Review

Quite possibly the best efficiency enhancement available for Mac OS X! One of the main drawbacks of modern operating systems including Mac OS X is the difficulty of finding things - especially applications. Spotlight is a step in the right direction, but still far too slow for true harmony. The dock can hold a limited subset of commonly used applications or even a folder for hierarchical browsing, but these methods fall short as well. Searching visually for a given app can be time consuming and frustrating especially for those less commonly used.

Launch Bar is another application from the NeXT days which aims to solve this problem. To access a given application, simply type ⌘ (command) space, and then the first few letters of its name. A list of close matches will pop down from the menu bar; if the desired choice is at the top, hit return. If not, type a few more letters or use the arrow keys (or mouse) to select it. What could be simpler?

Extensive preferences for what to index are available as well as support for opening or viewing far more than just applications. Web site URLs, folders, files, address book entries, system preference panes, bookmarks, etc.. You'll wonder how you ever lived without this wonderful app!

Note, see also Quicksilver which was reviewed after LaunchBar.

• By objective development.
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Afloat 1.0 Review

"Afloat. Light as air." An unusual user interface enhancement which adds several new options to the Window menu of all Cocoa applications. The namesake "keep afloat" option forces the current window to float over all other windows; something which is occasionally useful. When a window is kept afloat, it is translucent unless the mouse pointer is placed over it, at which point it becomes opaque. Another menu option lets you arbitrarily adjust the transparency level of the current window. Probably the most useful enhancement is the ability to move any window by ⌃⌘ (control command) clicking and dragging anywhere on it rather than on the title bar as usual.

Requires installation of the free SIMBL framework (included with download) for loading additional code into Cocoa applications. Due to this "hack," it is possible that installation of plugins like Afloat could adversely affect the security or stability of your system, so proceed with caution.

• By millenomi.
• download (freeware)
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SoundSource 1.1 Review

When switching between multiple sound input and output sources using the built in System Preferences pane becomes frustrating, try SoundSource. This simple free menu extra alleviates the problem by allowing you to quickly choose a global sound input and output source with the click of a menu. A perfect example of something which should have been built in to start with!

• By Rogue Amoeba.
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Dictionary 1.0.1 Review

The Oxford American Dictionary and Thesaurus is bundled for free with Mac OS X version 10.4 (Tiger) and above! This well designed and full featured dictionary application is less than a click away when you need the definition for a pesky word.

A seldom known feature accessible from any application written with Cocoa is the ability to obtain the definition for a word on the fly. Hold down ⌃⌘D (control command D) while your mouse pointer is hovering over any word and a definition will pop up - no need to click! You can also bring the entire dictionary to the foreground by clicking on the "More..." button. Note that this shortcut is customizable in the Keyboard & Mouse System Preference pane and may be set differently on your computer. The dictionary automatically finds matching definitions as you type in its search field, and usually includes word origins which make them easier to remember in the future. Well done for a free included application!

• By Apple Computer, Inc.
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AntiRSI 1.4 Review

RSI, which stands for repetitive strain injury, is a problem plaguing more and more people as computer use becomes ubiquitous in our modern world. Since treatment for this condition is difficult, taking preventative measures is the way to go.

This freeware gem helps you prevent RSI; AntiRSI keeps track of how much you're using the mouse and keyboard and reminds you to take breaks accordingly. Two different break types are provided - the "micro pause," and the "work break." During a micro pause, which may be on the order of ten seconds, moving the mouse or typing will force the pause to start over - a good incentive to hold still! During a work break, which is typically a few minutes long, movement only causes the countdown to pause which prevents you from accidentally resetting a long countdown. A "postpone" button is also present on the work break in case it comes up at an inopportune moment. This software is well thought out and worth trying!

• By Onne Gorter.
• download (freeware)
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Chimoosoft OS X Picks

Started a new web page of software picks by Chimoosoft.

OmniWeb 5.5 Review

A "power user's" web browser which hails from the NeXT glory days but has been thoroughly updated for Tiger. Useful features include resizable graphical tabs, collections of windows and tabs called workspaces, and preferences customizable on a site by site basis. Web browsing is a fast and pleasant experience since the rendering core is shared with Safari.

The joy of using this browser is in discovering all the finishing touches that have been put in. For example, to duplicate a given tab, hold down the option key and drag the tab in the vertical tab drawer (akin to copying files in the Finder). When relaunching the browser, the previous workspace is restored including all windows, tabs, and scroll positions, enabling you to pick up browsing right where you left off. Begin typing in a window and matching links are highlighted; hit return, and the selected link is followed. ⇧⌘ (shift command) F jumps to the web search field which defaults to Google, but is completely customizable.

Other interesting features include searchable and sync-able bookmarks, RSS feed support, speech recognition, HTML source code editor, ad blocking, ability to send a workspace to another user, and form fill. The peace of mind attained by using this browser will make you forget you had to pay for it! A free demo is available.

• By The Omni Group.
• download (demo)
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Tofu 1.3 Review

Tofu is a unique electronic book reader which splits text files into columns and scrolls horizontally rather than vertically. This creative approach improves readability on a computer screen while saving your eyes from fatigue. A horizontal scroll bar along the bottom shows your position in the text while easy keyboard controls move the text side to side. Tofu also includes speech recognition support and a full screen mode - both appear to work well. An alpha of version 2 is also available.

• By Amar Sagoo.
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Capture Me Now OpenGL Based

Rewrite of Capture Me in Cocoa and upgrade to universal binary is imminent! New version is 4 times faster and uses OpenGL!

Chimoo Timer Universal

First universal binary (Intel/PPC) release! Chimoo Timer is now universal!

Terrabrowser Tiger

Terrabrowser is not yet fully compatible with Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4.x). Currently, it appears to work correctly as long as the bookmarks file is not present. If your copy crashes upon launch, move your bookmarks file out of the way first. The Tiger compatible version of Terrabrowser will be released tomorrow (April 28th).

Garmin Supports OS X

Garmin has announced Mac OS X support for all of their GPS software!