Exposé Review

Apple introduced Exposé with Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" in April of 2005, however, many Mac users either don't realize that it exists, or don't know how to utilize it to the full extent. Exposé helps you deal with the constant clutter of overlapping windows and the need to drag and drop items from one window to another by quickly getting things out of your way.

Before getting started, make sure you have set up the keyboard shortcuts to your liking - open System Preferences and choose "Dashboard & Exposé." On a laptop Mac where many of the function keys are already mapped to things like screen or keyboard brightness, it helps to double up Exposé on the two remaining keys, F11 and F12 (screenshot). On our setup, pressing F11 shows all windows, while ⌥ (option) F11 shows only windows in the current application. F12 reveals the desktop, and ⌥F12 shows Dashboard (Hint: to set the keyboard shortcut to use ⌥, hold it down while clicking on the shortcut menu.) It's also possible to set screen corner shortcuts, but many people find these confusing since they are often bumped by accident.

Aside from simply revealing your myriad windows and letting you quickly bring the desired one to the front, Exposé really shines when combined with drag and drop. Drag and drop has been a hallmark of the Macintosh experience since the beginning, but it can be difficult to use since the source and target windows are often buried under multiple layers. Exposé can help. Assuming your keyboard shortcuts are set up as indicated above, press F12 to reveal the desktop, grab a file, and start dragging it. While still dragging, press F11 to reveal windows in all non-hidden applications. Drag the file over the desired window and either press F11 again to immediately bring the window to the front, or pause for a few seconds and Exposé will bring it to the front automatically. Drop the file. You have now completed a drag and drop without moving any windows!

Variations of this can also be used to drag things between programs without involving the desktop. The key to the whole experience is to not let go of your dragged item until you've tried out various Exposé shortcuts.

• By Apple, Inc.
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TextWrangler 2.2.1 Review

TextWrangler is a robust, fast, and free text editor for Mac OS X from BareBones software which replaces their older but widely used "BBEdit Lite" (first released in 1993). This editor is a good choice for those needing a powerful editor with syntax highlighting and regular expression support but not wanting to pay for a commercial editor. As with other text editors, this product is aimed at software and web developers; TextWrangler is not a word processor.

Common needs such as changing a file's line break characters between Unix, Mac, and Windows or changing the file encoding between variations of Unicode and Western (Mac OS Roman) are a single click away. Operations such as removing line breaks, processing (and searching) a file with regular expressions, or hard wrapping text are also trivial. The bundled command line tools let you easily open files from the terminal directly with TextWrangler removing the need to use older programs such as vi. TextWrangler also has better AppleScript support than almost any Mac OS X program you're likely to encounter and includes full script recording support. Simply open Apple's ScriptEditor, press the Record button, and begin working in TextWrangler; press Stop when finished and then replay your script. Unlike many other editors, TextWrangler is extremely fast and lean - this is the cheetah of text editors.

The latest versions of TextWrangler have gone a long way towards modernizing the program; a new toolbar, OS X native spell checking, and document drawer are some of the features which set this software apart from the original BBEdit Lite. Although TextWrangler covers all the basics extremely well, it doesn't do as much for you as newer editors such as TextMate which has many helpful macros and project level file management. Even if you don't use it as your main editor, TextWrangler certainly makes an excellent backup when the paid editors drop the ball on something you need to get done quickly. BareBones also offers a more fully featured commercial version called BBEdit.

• By BareBones.
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Free Ruler 1.7b5 Review

Free Ruler is exactly what it sounds like: a freeware ruler for your computer screen. Position one end of the ruler on the start point, drag the other end as long or tall as necessary, and move your mouse pointer around. The ruler shows the pointer's position with a dotted line making it easy to measure precise distances. Try using it in conjunction with control scroll zoom for even better results.

Why would you want a ruler? Anyone working with graphics or layout on a computer needs the ability to measure pixel distances on the screen. This program is a real help when debugging that troublesome CSS code or laying out a user interface. This may seem like a simple program, but it comes in handy more often than you might think!

Note: this may have issues when Leopard comes out due to Leopard's new resolution independence, so look for a new version from the developer at that time.

• By Pascal.
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Terrabrowser Universal Binary and TubeTV

Terrabrowser is now a universal binary internally (not yet released) - after reworking the GPX file handling to make it more compatible with a wider range of GPX files, a new beta will be released. Also, a new program called TubeTV is almost finished which will allow exporting YouTube and Google Video videos to formats for Apple TV and iPod. Stay tuned.

Flip4Mac 2.1 Review

Like it or not, Windows Media Video files (.wmv) are common on the web and Mac users need a good way to play them. In the past, Microsoft provided a free version of their Windows Media Player for Mac OS X, but discontinued it about a year ago. This isn't a huge loss since Windows Media Player for Mac OS X was never very well done (let's just say it wasn't a pleasure to use) and the new alternative is actually easier to deal with.

Flip4Mac allows you to play Windows Media files with the standard Apple QuickTime Player and also plays movies embedded in web page. After installing the software, dealing with wmv files is no more trouble than dealing with normal QuickTime files. The full version of the software has many more options and allows conversion from wmv files into other formats suitable for devices such as your iPod and Apple TV. The free trial allows export using QuickTime Pro (review), but places a watermark across the video.

• By Telestream, Inc..
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Aperture 1.5.2 Review

Aperture is one of Apple's newest and most hyped "Pro" Apps which is targeted primarily at professional photographers and advanced amateurs. If you use a digital SLR or high end prosumer camera and consider photography to be one of your main hobbies or profession, Aperture may be for you. Otherwise, you probably won't want to spend more for this software than you did for your camera! While mainly an image organization tool with meta-data support, Aperture also provides tools for the most common photo editing needs such as crop, free rotate, red eye reduction, white balance, sharpening, levels, exposure, blemish removal, and RAW adjustments. Like iPhoto, Aperture also includes the ability to produce photo books, order prints, and make web albums but all with more freedom and control. Basically, this is iPhoto on steroids.

Possibly the largest freedom which Aperture provides is the ability to edit your photos endlessly without worry. No longer will you have to think about saving copies, wasting disk space, or protecting the originals. Your master images (digital negatives) are always preserved and any and all changes you make to them can be undone or altered at any point in the future without sacrificing image quality. Instead of actually changing your photos and re-saving them (as you may have done with other tools), Aperture saves only the digital "recipe" used to make the changes. In addition to being able to easily undo your changes, this also means that extra disk space is not wasted when you make additional copies or edited versions of images. In the past, you may have restricted yourself to editing only those images in dire need of help, but it's so trivial to do with Aperture that you'll find yourself making small corrections across the board. The ease with which photos can be edited and organized in this program is phenomenal!

Other innovative features such as the ability to stack similar images on top of one another hiding all but the best (called "stacks"), and the integrated "vault" one-click backup system are a joy to use. If you really need Photoshop, Aperture even lets you send files to it for editing with one click, and as soon as you save, they come right back into Aperture with the changes! This software does so much and has so many innovative features that it would take pages and pages to even mention them all - instead, why not dive in and watch the online tutorials to get a feel?

At the time of this writing, a free thirty day trial version of Aperture is available for download from Apple's website. A discounted (half price) educational version is also available. Aside from the high cost, the only real drawback of this software is the required CPU and graphics horsepower. Warning: if you have anything older than a 1.5 GHz G4 with at least 1 GB of RAM, Aperture may cause excessive hair loss and fidgeting.

Adobe makes a competing cross-platform application called Lightroom, but if you're using a Mac, Aperture is probably the one for you. The author of this review has used both of them and far prefers the feature set and OS X integration of Aperture.

• By Apple, Inc..
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