Backup 3.1.2 Review

Many options for backing up your data exist on Mac OS X, and with the introduction of Leopard's Time Machine, many users will never need to venture out into the wild west of backup software again. However, for users with more specific needs, software such as Apple's Backup (included with a .Mac subscription) fills an important niche.

Backup allows you to create multiple backup plans making it easy to preserve only the data you are currently worried about. When creating a plan, simple presets such as "Home Folder" and "Personal Data & Settings" can be chosen, or customize your own plan to include or exclude specific files and folders. There are also many preset data types which can be chosen including "Keychain", "iTunes Purchases", and "Pages Documents". Backup can even perform a Spotlight search at backup time to gather all files with certain characteristics; i.e., all documents containing a certain word or phrase. After choosing the files, add as many schedules and destinations for the plan as desired. For example, you can have the plan backup to your iDisk once a week and to a CD or DVD once a month. When manually performing a backup, it's easy to pick which device the backup should go to, and if you choose something too big to fit on a single CD or DVD, Backup will prompt you to insert more media as necessary.

The only immediately obvious drawback of Backup is the fact that only one backup plan can be executing at a time; it's not possible to start several simultaneous backups. Some people have also complained about the way Backup stores your files in a package, but you can always delve into the package by right-clicking on it and choosing "Show Package Contents". For the author, Backup is almost a good enough solution to justify the cost of .Mac on its own.

A free demo of Backup is available when you sign up for a .Mac trial, but it limits you to only 100 MB of backup data at a time.

• By Apple Inc.
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OmniGraffle 4.1.2 Review

OmniGraffle is the premier vector based diagramming and layout tool for Mac OS X. This excellently designed program lets you produce beautiful org charts, UML diagrams, ER Diagrams, and more. A default set of "stencils" covers most basic shapes and many more are available for download from the web. Connect objects together with the line tool and drag them around or use the auto layout tool to create a balanced graph.

In addition to producing diagrams, the program is versatile enough for creating icons, web badges, or even "art." Bezier curves, shadows, gradients, grouping, and layers give you plenty of options. Many of the graphics on the Chimoosoft website were created using OmniGraffle including the RSS feed badge, most of the icons in the top right hand corners, and even the icon for Chimoo Timer. For the professionals out there, the pro version allows import and export of Visio documents.

This is one of those rare programs which is truly a joy to use; in addition to functionality, you get to have fun!

• By The Omni Group.
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OmniOutliner Professional 3.6.2 Review

OmniOutliner Pro is a versatile but lightweight program which is useful for much more than simply making an outline. It particularly shines as a list maker, but can also be used for taking notes, writing documentation, or replacing your spreadsheet for simple tasks. The multi column and summary features make it easy to add up all expenses in a column, or time spent working on certain projects. Features such as intelligent date parsing allow you to type things like "next tuesday" and have Outliner figure out exactly what you mean. Checkboxes come in handy for some types of lists, but fortunately, can be turned off for others.

OmniOutliner is designed to be used quickly and easily from your keyboard - a simple press of the return key gets a new bullet, and simple key commands (or mouse drags) change indentation. This efficiency makes it a great tool for tasks such as taking meeting notes or minutes. The styles overlay view is one of the more impressive features; it lets you easily set all imaginable style attributes (color, background, font, size, shadow, and more) for each level of indentation in the document. As new items are added, the appropriate style is automatically applied. Templates of your favorite styles can be saved, set as default, and restored later when creating new documents.

Exporting to other formats such as PDF, text, HTML, and dynamic-HTML is easily accomplished. The release notes for all Chimoosoft software were created with Outliner's dynamic-HTML export.

A cheaper non-professional version is also available (and commonly bundled with new Apple computers), but it lacks nice features such as folded editing, templates, and more. If you're tempted by the cheaper version, at least download the demo of the pro version first to see what you're missing.

• By The Omni Group.
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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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QuickTime Pro 7.1.5 Review

Although the basic QuickTime Player is included with every Mac and free to download for Windows, it is somewhat crippled unless you purchase the "Pro" version. By going Pro, you gain several handy features related to saving and editing movies as well as full screen playback. Note that the Pro version usually has to be re-purchased for each "major" version of QuickTime - for example, 6, 7, and 8 when it comes out.

Many websites use QuickTime to play their movies; Pro gives you the ability to save any of these to your local computer by simply clicking on the bottom right corner popup menu and choosing "Save as QuickTime Movie..." It also becomes possible to edit movie clips in the player. You can now copy, cut, and paste sections of movies together to remove unwanted portions from existing movies or make brand new ones from scratch. For the photography buffs out there, you now have the ability to create a new QuickTime movie from a batch of time lapse photographs using the "Open Image Sequence..." command. In addition, recording movies and sound directly in QuickTime Player, and saving in formats optimized for iPod or Apple TV (H.264) is also enabled.

Possibly the feature you'll use the most in QuickTime Pro is the fullscreen movie watching - just press ⌘ (command) F to enter full screen mode complete with movie controls which appear when you move the mouse. For a full list of features, visit the QuickTime Pro web site.

• By Apple, Inc.
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GraphicConverter 5.9.5 Review

GraphicConverter is many things: a poor man's Photoshop replacement, a versatile photo organizer with IPTC and EXIF tagging support, an excellent way to present a slide show, a robust photo editor, a batch processor, and an image format converter. The software has been around for many years and pre-dates OS X although it is frequently updated and now a universal binary. GraphicConverter can open files in nearly 200 formats and export in nearly 100. It is also available in twelve languages!

Since Photoshop is a bit of a beast and takes its time launching, you may find yourself using GraphicConverter for typical Photoshop tasks such as cropping, resizing, alpha layers, and basic photo corrections. GraphicConverter launches in a snap and is ready to do your bidding. The batch change feature is quite powerful (although the interface is antiquated) and makes short work of entire folders of images. It's easy to use for tasks such as creating thumbnails with different titles or file formats and is used extensively for the images which end up on this web page.

GraphicConverter may be used indefinitely with a short startup delay, however, it's well worth paying the small fee to support this fine software. The developer is also unusually responsive; if you find problems or have reasonable feature requests, he will often fix or implement them within weeks or months - quite different from the experience you'd get contacting Adobe.

The only real drawback of GraphicConverter is the sometimes obtuse user interface, portions of which (batch processing, etc.) haven't changed much since the early nineties. GraphicConverter also suffers a bit from "featureitis" and it can sometimes be difficult to find a desired feature or figure out how to set the preferences to achieve the desired goal. Still, the program is affordable, robust, fast, and hard to do without. It's a venerable workhorse and is sure to find a place in your workflow!

• By Lemkesoft.
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TextMate 1.5.4 Review

TextMate is an advanced text editor designed with software and web developers in mind (chimoosoft.com is maintained with it). Notable features include tabs, project level management of files, multi-file (project) search with regular expression support, text-completion, syntax highlighting for scores of languages, a command line launcher, and countless editable macros defined for each language to reduce typing and improve efficiency. Standard OS X spell checking is also included, but with a nice twist - it's smart enough to avoid flagging items such as HTML tags. A built in web preview is available and many scripting languages have the ability to run and display their output within TextMate.

In addition to your standard and expected text editor features, TextMate can do some truly amazing things. For example, when writing HTML, select a word, press a key shortcut, and TextMate will look up the best matching link for the word on Google and insert it as a link in your HTML code! If you can't remember the appropriate key combo, a floating searchable browser is available where you can quickly find the shortcut you desire. Find the large number of features overwhelming? Check out the free online "screencasts" (iTunes link) which demonstrate how to use TextMate's powerful features or browse the extensive online help.

• By MacroMates.
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Transmit 3.5.6 Review

Tired of your free file transfer client? There are many different ftp/sftp clients for Mac OS X including the built in terminal commands, however the free ones often leave something to be desired. After variously using RBrowser, Fetch, CyberDuck (free), and Fugu (free) over the years, Transmit finally emerged as the preferred choice. If you want a client which offers a very Mac like interface without any hassles, Transmit may be the choice for you.

Transmit features a column browser which shows both "your files" (local) and "their files" (remote) side by side. It can be set to default to your favorite directory both locally and remotely at launch time and can even automatically connect to your favorite server. A handy synchronization feature allows you to synchronize a local directory with a remote one and includes advanced options for which types of files and modification date ranges to ignore (this is how chimoosoft.com is updated). Other handy features include queued file transfers, spring-loaded folders, linked local and remote folder browsing, drag and drop from the Finder, and editing of your remote files via your favorite editor(s). Integration with Quicksilver and Dashboard is also provided.

• By Panic.
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Cepstral Text-to-Speech 4 Review

Do you enjoy text-to-speech, but are tired of the built in Mac OS X voices? Cepstral has ten US English voices available for download as well as UK English, Italian, Canadian French, German, and Americas Spanish. After installing, they appear in the speech System Preference pane alongside the traditional voices.

The quality of the voices is comparable to the best Apple provided voices, and some of them such as Callie, William, and David may be superior. Cepstral also includes a command line utility called "swift" which allows you to synthesize voice directly into an audio file. For example, swift -n Callie -f review.txt -o cepstral.wav produced this sample file. The demo voices vocally ask you to register before speaking your text but are still fun to play with.

• By Cepstral.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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