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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Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0-b5 Review

Carbon Copy Cloner is a backup utility which has recently received a massive face lift and is now much more accessible to the average Mac user. Prior versions performed their task well - cloning a disk volume to a disk image or other volume, but the user interface was somewhat confusing for beginners. Version 3.0 still performs the same basic functions but is now easier to pick up and begin using without a manual.

The Mac software marketplace is currently rife with programs claiming to provide easy backup solutions, but most of them are either difficult to use, unreliable, or not fully featured enough. Carbon Copy Cloner appears to stand up well to the task, and it's donation-ware so you can pay what you think is fair! Although the upcoming Time Machine (arriving in Leopard) may alleviate the need for these types of programs for the casual user, Carbon Copy Cloner will still have a valuable place in the enterprise world for backing up servers before upgrades or providing a bootable backup of your own computer. In addition, as the author mentions on his web site, this software could be invaluable for backing up your computer before sending it in for repairs.

Using the software is fairly straight forward - choose a source volume on the left and a target volume, remote server, or disk image on the right. Press the clone button to begin the backup. Folders and files can be unchecked in the source to exclude them from the clone and disk images can be created for you at run time and even automatically encrypted. A nice paragraph form summary entitled "what is going to happen" appears at the bottom for review before proceeding with the clone operation. Other thoughtful features include the ability to restore from a clone, schedule clones to occur at regular intervals (useful for servers or desktop machines), and run shell scripts before and after a clone.

Note that the version tested is still in beta, so some features are a little rough around the edges.

• By Bombich Software.
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Terrabrowser Universal Binary and TubeTV

Development work has resumed on Terrabrowser after a long hiatus. Look for a new beta with minor changes in the not too distant future.

Capture Me and Chimoo Timer Released

Final releases of the new Capture Me and Chimoo Timer are now available.

FileMerge 2.2.1 Review

FileMerge is a visual diff tool freely included with the Apple developer tools. If you have installed the developer tools on your computer (they come bundled for free on the install disks which came with your Mac), you can find FileMerge nicely hidden in the /Developer/Applications/Utilities/ folder. Amazingly, many people developing software on the Mac haven't yet discovered FileMerge - if you're one of them, now is the time to do so. Apple provides lots of little goodies in the /Developer folder which are worth learning about.

Although it can be used to compare and merge any two text files you desire, FileMerge will mainly be of interest to software developers. If you've ever used the Unix diff tool, using FileMerge is like seeing the light; differences are actually visible side by side and easily understood at a glance - no more deciphering strange diff codes on the command line. As you jump to a difference in one file with the arrow keys, the second file scrolls to the same position and highlights the changes. You can also jump directly to methods/functions and choose which version of a change you want merged into the final output file. True, performing the same diff in the terminal is more condensed and geeky, but the FileMerge equivalent is much easier to grasp and work with. Many tools such as Xcode and svnX also have direct links within them which launch FileMerge for you.

• By Apple, Inc.
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