Mac - page 63

There’s something about a really well-edited photo that just “pops”. And then there are the photos that have had creative filters applied and you just see the image in a whole new way. You know it’s not magic right? You know that all it takes is practice, the right image, and…the right software.

Sure, iPhoto is pretty good and Aperture is powerful, but neither of them are really designed for effects (or layering effects), which is where FX Photo Studio Pro comes in. Part of the Cult Of Mac Deals FX Photo Studio Pro is usually $40 in the Mac App Store, but you can get it for $20 now!

The lovefest known as the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference starts Monday. As with any such event that involves Apple announcing new products, the global outpouring of love will be matched by a rising outpouring of hate.

Some people hate Apple. Other people hate people who hate Apple. Many of these haters have turned pro, leading to a lucrative “hater industrial complex.”

I know, because I’ve been the target of hate from both sides. I’m on the hate list of both the most extreme anti-Apple haters and pro-Apple haters.

Passion in technology, flame-wars, fanboyism and its discontents are nothing new. But in the past couple of years, something new has happened: The loudest, most insistent hate is now coming from the anti-Apple crowd, rather than the pro-Apple people.

I’ll tell you why below.

Also, it needs to be said: Haters are rare. The vast majority of users — and the vast majority of bona fide fans — don’t fall into the “hater” category. But haters appear to be everywhere because they’re active and vocal, and their rants memorable.

But first, let’s understand once and for all who hates, how they hate, and why.

Are you ready to go paperless, but need a great way to convert your scans to editable text? Do you get lots of PDFs to review and need something with more oomph than Preview for edits, annotations, and changes? PDF is a great file format, but sometimes it’s frustrating when you need to do other stuff to them like convert them to another format, edit them, or pull out images or text for other documents. This is why you need PDF Editor Pro.

Regularly this is a $100 app, but it’s yours for $48 right now as a Cult of Mac Deal.

Put your hand up if you can do more with PowerPoint than make a simple presentation that goes from slide to slide? Fine, you can put your hand up if you know how to make a transition. The thing is though, PowerPoint is a pretty powerful program and can do a lot more than just a simple slideshow. Sure, PowerPoint gets a bad wrap for the terrible slides that people produce—not PowerPoint’s fault, typewriters have been used to write dreck for years!—but you can make a stunning visual impact with PowerPoint—if you know how.

Good thing we’ve got a PowerPoint for Mac course for you as today’s Daily Deal.

How many 7th Graders can say they best selling authors? Well this group of kids from Woodlawn Beach Middle School in Northern Florida can thanks to their teacher Andrea Santilli and iBooks Author.

Ms. Santilli, a self-professed “die-hard Mac girl”, was looking for a new way to not only challenge her Advanced Life Sciences class, but also leverage technology to make learning fun. Not to mention get some practical experience in the real world of writing, photography, video, and ebook publishing. Just a few minutes with this free ebook and you can see how much potential there is for iBooks Author and iPads in the classroom. Not to mention you’ll probably learn something interesting.

You know how in many Google web apps you can just press CMD-? to bring up an overlay containing all the keyboard shortcuts available? (you did know that, right?) Well, now you can do the same with any app on your Mac using the sweet and simple CheatSheet, a free app with this one single purpose.

Speaking of Lightroom and iOS, what if you could take the beautifully shot RAW files from your SLR, bring them into Adobe’s super-powerful processing app and… apply Instagram filters? Now you can, thanks to a $5 set of presets from Casey Mac Photo.

The Macquarium has been around for decades, starting as a project to make use of old compact Mac cases. Subsequent iterations have seen many different variations – beige Performas, G3 iMacs, G4 Cubes, etc.. But this latest iteration is unique, and probably has the best structural integrity of them all.

Steve Shaw recently created his Macquarium from a PowerMac G5 case (mislabeled as a Mac Pro in the video), elbow grease and some powertools. He did a nice job, bright and airy. I love the Apple logo in the rear and overall industrial look. And the totem head.

Next up we need a Siamese fighting fish in a Mac Mini…

Source: Gizmodo

Are you a fan of plain-text files? Are you nerdy enough to stuff your todo lists into a todo.txt file? What if I told you that you could bring a lick of modernity to the your old-fashioned, candlelit ways? It’s called TaskBadges, and it adds a numbered badge to any plain-text list telling you how many uncompleted tasks are left inside.

If you own an iPad and like to get out of bed on time, then you probably own a copy of Due, the super-simple alarm and timer app for iOS. It’s probably the easiest and best designed alarm app around, and now it is available on the Mac.

What does it take to be a vintage Mac collector?

A love of all things Apple and an encyclopedic knowledge of the many successful, unsuccessful and downright notorious products Cupertino has released over the years are a given. But the job can be more perilous than you’d imagine.

Just ask Adam Goolevitch. Known as “wozniac” on eBay, Adam is one of the premier vintage Mac collectors around. In just he last couple of months, some of Googlevitch’s rarest finds — including a 128k Mac with a 5.25” Twiggy floppy disk drive and a Macintosh SE with a clear outer case — have hit the web and sparked a flurry of interest.

But collecting these Macs isn’t always easy. From almost losing a finger to a PowerMac G4 Cube to mistakenly being investigated by the police under the suspicion of dealing drugs instead of Macs, Googlevitch has some wild stories to tell that prove that being a vintage Mac collector isn’t necessarily for the faint of heart.

Cult of Mac sat down with Adam to hear some of his adventures and also get the scoop on the rarest machines in his collection.

Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom 4 can now be bought from the Mac App Store. The RAW photo editing app joins Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, and is Adobe’s first full-featured flagship application to make it into the store.

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The brand-new version of AirServer is being billed as “The Game Console For Mac.” Like previous versions of the software, AirServer runs on you Mac and turns it into an AirPlay receiver, allowing you to stream music, video, photos and even games to the Mac’s big screen, just as if it was an Apple TV. What’s new, though, is the ability to stream games from two players simultaneously for big-screen head-to-head action.

If you want a great Simplenote-compatible, note taking app for your Mac, then you should download the free and excellent Notational Velocity. If you want a harder to use, bigger and — some might say — uglier app to do the same thing, then Metanota is just the thing for you.

Here’s an exclusive excerpt from a new book about Steve Jobs and Apple by ex-advertising Mad Man, Ken Segall. The book is called Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success, and it’s on sale tomorrow. In the excerpt, we learn about Steve Jobs’s great reaction to criticism of the infamous hockey puck mouse, how he responded quickly to mistakes, and his attitudes toward the “brand bank.”

Path Finder has long been a super full-featured Finder replacement for OS X, and now it has been updated to version 6. I have been trying Path Finder on and off for years now, but finally gave up as it’s pretty much impossible to kill the native Finder completely.

Add to this the fact that the Finder doesn’t suck nearly so much as it used to, and that I find most of what I want with Launchbar and Spotlight these days and I’d all but given up on Cocoatech’s offering. But as v6 adds support for file tagging and batch renaming which – in addition to it’s already impressive line-up of features – might make it worth another look.

Almost every cloud storage service on the Internet operates using a freemium model. Anyone who signs up gets a certain amount of storage for free. When someone uses up all their free storage, they can add more for a fee. Cloud providers usually layer on a few extra features for paid customers like the ability to stream audio files or the ability to restore deleted files or older versions of documents. Just like most companies now, they to outsource the support process making it easy for clients to resolve issues easily. Netzen is a company that provides IT support to businesses in the UK, consider checking them out if you need help with your IT.

With so many free options, however, it can be tempting to use multiple services simultaneously. Add files to a free Dropbox account up till the free 2GB, then create an account with Box for the next 5GB (Box’s free limit), then create a SugarSync account and on and on.

This approach, known as cloud squatting, effectively nets users unlimited free storage so long as they’re willing to play an ongoing game of musical chairs with their data. iOS and other mobile apps that can access and edit files across different services make it surprisingly easy for users to become cloud squatters – and it’s surprisingly difficult for a business or IT department to prevent or deal with cloud squatting employees.

Gemini is a Mac app that does one thing: Find duplicate files on your Mac. You just point it at a directory (your home folder is a good place to start) and sic it on your files. After a few moments it gives a list of anything that is doubled-up on your machine, and then the fun begins.

Want to download a trial version of Apple’s iWork apps? Tough. Apple just pulled them, replacing the page on its site with a notice sending you over to the App Store: “The trial version of iWork is no longer supported. But you can easily purchase Keynote, Pages, and Numbers from the Mac App Store to start creating beautiful presentations, documents, and spreadsheets today.”

Translation: Everything – and we mean everything, will be going through the App Store from now on.

OpenDNS, the DNS provider of choice to the discerning and paranoid, is blocking the Flashback Trojan. Once it has infected your Mac, Flashback attempts to “call home” to a server to receive further instructions.

Open DNS will now block that connection.

Described simply, the Apogee Jam ($99) is a just little gadget that lets you plug your guitar into your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. But in this pairing of instrument and iDevice, the Jam unlocks a wonderful world of musical possibility that is nothing short of magical.

Porthole is a Mac app which will stream all the audio coming from your computer to AirPlay speakers, instead of just the music from iTunes. It’s kind of like Rogue Amoeba’s excellent AirFoil, only much less fine-grained in terms of control.

Lightroom 4 isn’t nearly as big of an update as versions 2 or 3, but that’s more of a sign of a mature product than anything else. There are a few all-new features, but the one thing that will really, really want to upgrade is the new Highlights and Shadows section. It really is good enough to justify this point-release upgrade all by itself.

WIMP computing was invented during the Nixon Administration.

In 1973, Xerox PARC developed the Alto computer, the first to use all the WIMP elements of windows, icons, menus and a pointing device, also known as a mouse.

And it’s in this nearly 40-year-old paradigm that we find ourselves trapped by a quirk of human nature: We’re creatures of habit. We don’t like to change the way we do things. And so here we are, still using a mouse (most of us, anyway).

Before our full review next week, here’s a great little how-to guide on using geotagging in Lightroom 4. Adobe’s photo-editing and cataloging app has caught up with iPhoto and Aperture in its latest version, and you can now view any photos with embedded GPS co-ordinates on an in-app map. This means any of your iPhone photos can be browsed by location, which is a surprisingly useful tool.

But what if you want to reverse tag your photos? Say your camera doesn’t have GPS, but you have a track log recorded on a GPS device or with an iPhone app. How do you put this data together in a useful way? Below, Adobe’s Terry White shows us how.