software - page 29

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On Monday, April 12th, Adobe’s going to unveil their Creative Suite 5. We don’t know much what’s going to be different, except that Flash CS5 is finally supposed to allow developers to export Flash-based applications as App Store .ipa files.

That said, the video above gives a tantalizing look at one of the new features in Photoshop CS5: content-aware tools, which allow the program to make educated guesses on what you want to fill or replace a section of image with.

You need to watch the entire clip to see how impressive this is, but by the end of the video, CS5’s content aware tools have gone from simply plucking stray shadows and lens flare’s out of shots to seamlessly autofilling 30% of a missing panorama in just a few seconds.

Sure, these examples are obviously cherry-picked by Adobe to apply to the strength of Photoshop CS5, but if their content-aware tools are even half this good at release, CS5 seems like a must-have update.

[via 9to5Mac]

This is YoruFukurou, a Twitter client from Japan, built by @seabream and @aki_null.

It’s a native app for 10.5.8 or 10.6, and packs a lot of features into a nicely self-contained and fairly minimal little package.

One of those features is tabs: you can add Twitter-wide searches or personal filters to the line of filters that appears just below the text entry box.

YoruFukurou (it means “Night Owl”) supports link shortening, TwitPic pictures, current iTunes song, and loads more. It counts your tweet’s characters, it has a variety of appearance modes and adjustable colors, and a decent set of keyboard shortcuts. In short: it’s neat. It really does cater to pretty much all your Twittering needs – well, certainly all of mine, but then I’m not a terribly demanding Twitter user. (Sorry, can’t bring myself to say “Tweeter”. Euw.)

Best of all, it’s free. Go get it.

Keyboard launcher app Alfred has been coming along nicely since we last covered it.

The latest release takes it to 0.5 and adds a bunch of good stuff, including a built-in basic calculator, support for Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” and Wolfram Alpha, and the ability to change keywords for specific web search commands. So, the default command to search Twitter is “twitter”, but you can now edit that to “ts” if you like.

Also hidden away in the newly enlarged preferences panel is this “Special” item. It says: “Do not press this button”

Got that? Don’t press it.

Just don’t.

Pressing the button is a bad idea. That’s why they tell you not to press it.

Under no circumstances should you download this software and press this button. None whatsoever. Got that?

Good.

Thanks to some great hardware design and some daringly surreptitious pricing agreements between Apple and the biggest publishers out there, Amazon’s Kindle e-reader has been feeling the pinch from the still unreleased iPad for the last few months, and it’s only going to get worse from here.

Still, the Kindle has at least one advantage the iPad doesn’t (yet): cross-platform libraries. Until (or even if) Amazon can put together a next-gen Kindle device that out-iPads the iPad, it behooves them to get their Kindle e-reading application on as many devices as possible as a stop-gap measure.

No surprise, then, that after a delay of several months, Amazon has finally brought the Kindle application to OS X. Unfortunately, it has all of the hallmarks of a panicked beta release (which is probably what it is) including some very sloppy and un-Mac-like interface design, the bizarre omission of a search function and some very swampy text rendering.

In other words, download at the peril of your sense of clean OS X aestheticism and functional application design. Unless you don’t plan on picking up an iPad, or have a large existing library of Kindle e-books, there’s little reason to give this a go.

So another MacHeist has been and gone, and no doubt a lot of Cult readers jumped in to get their bundle of apps for a bargain price.

But not everyone thinks it’s necessarily such a good idea.

Soft Sailor is a tech blog I’ve not encountered before, but today I stumbled across a very odd post indeed. Published just yesterday, it recommends downloading something a little bit unusual: Internet Explorer 5.2.3.

Which is only, let’s see now… about seven years old.

The author Dragos Pirvu writes:

“Although it’s not that popular on Mac computers, Internet Explorer is also available on Apple’s Mac OS X platform and it’s doing a fairly good job.”

And what’s more:

“Although it does have some security leaks, some Mac OS X developers are still using Internet Explorer to create CSS files and others.”

So that’s it. While the rest of us have needlessly upgraded to all this new-fangled stuff like Safari and Firefox, it’s the CSS devs who have faithfully – yet secretively – kept IE5 alive as a CSS editor. Who knew?

Free, open source operating system Ubuntu will take on a new look in its forthcoming 10.04 release.

Gone is the brown, in comes the auberginey-purple. It’s actually quite appealing and obviously takes a lot of cues from OS X (the file manager windows) and iPhone (the menu bar and its plain white icons).

Reaction among Ubuntu users has been mixed. On ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asks Can Ubuntu out-sexy Apple?:

“To me, the UI does indeed look … well … a bit Mac-like. But that might not be a bad thing. One of Mac’s major selling points is simplicity, and while Linux has a long way to go before it’s ready for the computing masses, giving the OS a more refined look might help people feel at home with the OS.”

He also points out that window controls in this theme have moved from top-right to top-left, another OS X-like feature. Some users aren’t terribly happy about that. But Ubuntu is very flexible – if they don’t like the default theme, they can easily switch to another.

I’d say it’s less of an attempt to “out-sexy” OS X, and more of an attempt to just bring things up-to-date. The brown theme served Ubuntu well for many years but it looks old-fashioned compared to Snow Leopard and Windows 7. It needed a fresh look and this one is smart, yet subdued.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is today’s Best Thing Ever.

Panic are the people who make fabulous Mac software like FTP client Transmit and web dev box-of-tricks Coda.

Now they’ve made their own status board – it’s a monitor hung on the wall, displaying an internal web page that aggregates stuff from different sources and displays it beautifully.

One of the things on there is tweets sent @panic – so while you’re watching them and saying how amazing their status board is, they’re watching you right back.

Thank you, Panic, for brightening up the internet this morning.

(Via Gruber and Hacker News.)

Well, it looks like it’s official: after accidentally leaking the existence of a Mac client in their latest beta, and teasing the same in a series of hysterical promotional images, Valve has announced that the Steam games delivery service will indeed be coming to OS X… along with the sequel to their nabacularly terrific teleportation puzzler, Portal.

Although I generally find a reason to pick them up anyway, I was particularly enamored with MacHeist’s last nanoBundle, which offered some really fantastic Mac apps (including my all-time favorite, distraction-free text editor, WriteRoom) for, well, nothing.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to beat free, which makes MacHeist’s sequel to the nanoBundle a little harder to recommend: it costs $20. Still, complaining about a few fins is just greedy when you’re looking at this amount of cheap quality software, including MacJournal, RipIt, Clips, CoverScout and Flow.

As usual, there’s further incentive to buy: once 50,000 people purchase the bundle, Tales of Monkey Island will be unlocked, with Rapidweaver to be unlocked at an unspecified point thereafter. I don’t believe MacHeist has ever failed to unlock every title in their bundles, regardless of sales, so you can probably consider it a sure-thing that you’ll get these two titles as well.

These are some great apps, each one of which normally costs more than the $20 asking price of the bundle. Even if you’re only interested in one or two of these titles, this is an impulse buy you can feel good about.

Plainview is a web browser with a difference. It’s a full screen browser, lacking any bells and whistles at all except just the one: no chrome, if you’ll forgive the pun.

So all you get is web content from floor to ceiling. Everything else gets hidden away, including your Dock and your Menu Bar.

So, you might wonder, why on earth would I want that? Good question.

Folks, let me tell you a secret: I sing. I sing all the damn time. It’s a good job I work at home all by myself, because if I worked in an office I’d drive my colleagues crazy by singing at them all the time.

And since the birth of the App Store, I’ve been looking for a looper. A looper, for those who don’t know, is a musical effects pedal that grabs a short snippet of audio and, well, loops it. Over and over again. And lets you record another loop on top. Repeat, ad lib to fade.

It’s a quick and easy way to do clever things live on stage, and fun things when you’re trying to write new songs.

There’s been a load of apps that promised some kind of looping capability, and I’ve tried a bunch of them and never found anything that really nailed it. Looping needs to be ultra-simple, instantaneous and spontaneous. None of the apps I tried made that possible. None of them until Everyday Looper.

This is absolutely great. Film critic Roger Ebert is premiering his new computer voice on Oprah this afternoon. Below is a sneak peek. His new voice — spoken by his MacBook — actually sounds like him. He looks really delighted with it.

“In first grade they said I talked too much, and now I still can,” he says, grinning.

Ebert lost his voice box after years of cancer treatments. He used to speak with “Alex,” the robotic voice built into OS X.  His new voice was created by CereProc, a company in Scotland that recreated it from hours of Ebert’s TV shows and DVD commentaries.

Via Videogum and Daring Fireball.

Alfred is a new keyboard launcher in the spirit of Quicksilver, Butler and LaunchBar.

A (free) beta was released last weekend by the UK-based team who’ve developed it.

If you’ve ever used any of those other keyboard launchers, Alfred will be instantly familiar. You invoke it using a global shortcut, then type whatever you want to find. Type an app name to launch it, or type “google” then your search term to search Google.

It has built-in shortcuts for searching Google, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, Bing, Twitter and plenty of others. It can also hunt down specific files or folders on your hard disk.

Here’s a cute little Twitter client called Pocket.

Pocket lives at the top of your display, permanently attached to your Menu Bar. Personally, that’s what I dislike about it most, but that’s because I’m a focus kind of person and I don’t want Twitter in my face the whole time. But Pocket wasn’t made for me.

No, Pocket was made for people who love having Twitter in their face the whole time, and for that purpose it totally rocks. I love the cute colors, I love the clever way that all the functionality you need is crammed into such a tiny weeny space. I love the one-tweet-at-a-time way that it displays things, giving you the chance to reply or retweet stuff as it arrives. Which is great if you can afford to spend your whole day watching Twitter.

I won’t be using Pocket myself, but if you love watching your tweets and want something colorful and cute to do it with, I’d recommend Pocket.

I’m always on the lookout for photography tools that are easy-to-use and help me turn good photos into great ones.

Nik Software’s Sharpener Pro 3 ($199.95), a plug-in for Aperture, Lightroom and Photoshop, does just that, which is probably why I find myself utilizing it pretty much any time I do a photo shoot.

With two sharpening modes, RAW and Output, NSP3 is built to handle all your photo sharpening needs. If you’d like to handle all your image sharpening from start to finish with NSP3, you can turn off your camera’s sharpening features and use NSP3’s RAW mode. Or, if you’re like me and your camera generally does a good job at handling sharpening tasks, NSP3’s Output mode works wonderfully to enhance photos that have already been pre-sharpened by a camera.

Nuance, the company behind Dragon Mobile for iPhone and the Naturally Speaking range of software products, has bought MacSpeech, makers of the jaw-droppingly amazing MacSpeech Dictate and its recent new sibling, MacSpeech Scribe.

It’s been years since I’ve used the Opera browser, but the latest beta version offers at least one tempting reason to switch: it’s fast. Really fast. So fast that it just smokes every other browser on the OS X platform.

It’s all thanks to Opera’s new JavaScript rendering engine, Carkan, and a new vector graphics library called Vega that handles all the graphics rendering. Seth Weintraub runs the math over at Computerworld, but the bottom line is that Opera 10.5 beta is about 10 percent faster at rendering pages than the previous champ, Safari 4.

The Boxee beta is finally available for Apple TV.

Boxee is Apple TV done right. It’s a great, Net-connected, “social” media player that allows you to play video from all over the Web as well as files from file-sharing networks. It streams content from sites like Netflix, Pandora and Last.fm, and makes it easy to get entertainment recommendations from friends. It transforms the Apple TV into a truly-useful internet video device.

The beta adds a much-improved that’s easier to navigate. Boxee on Apple TV was previously available only as an early alpha version. The latest beta was released in January but was unavailable for Apple TV users — until now.

A group of Boxee users have updated the ATV-Usb creator to install the Boxee Beta.

Users who already have Boxee Alpha installed on their AppleTV can simply update Launcher and then update Boxee to install the beta, no patchstick needed.

Link to announcement on Boxee blog.

Take a screenshot tour of the Boxee beta after the jump.

Ever wondered what your mouse pointer actually does all day? Ever wanted to have a way of tracking where it goes while you work, and exporting that information as a map of your daily mousings?

If you have, you need IOGraph.

It’s simple, it’s free, it’s fun, and it’s brilliant: it watches your mouse movements for as long as you want it to, tracking the times when the pointer is moving rapidly and the times it spends standing still in one place.

It plots all this on a view of your computer’s desktop, showing the movements as fine lines and the stationary periods as enlarged blobs.

You can choose to have your map on a plain white background, or superimposed over a screenshot of your desktop. If you search Flickr for “iograph”, you’ll find a few people who’ve made some great images with it. Co-creator Anatoly Zenkov has some cool images made with IOGraph in his photostream.

(Via Styledeficit.)

Thoughts is a desktop notebook app for Mac OS X, designed to look and behave like a real world paper notebook or journal.

When you open the app you see a shelf where all your notebooks are stored. Notebooks open in a separate window and come complete with a turning-page visual effect.

The basic layout of every note page is the same; there are title and date fields at the top. The main note editing space has a nice-looking toolbar at the bottom where you can access all the formatting controls you’re likely to need.

Apple’s update to its professional photography application, Aperture 3, was met with excitement by OS X shutterbugs when it was unceremoniously released on February 16th, but since then, complaints that the program will suck up pretty much all of the free space on your hard drive during the library upgrade process have been widespread.

A new Aperture 3 patch addresses some of the issues that users have been having with the program, including fixes for:

• Upgrading libraries from earlier versions of Aperture
• Importing libraries from iPhoto
• Importing photos directly from a camera
• Memory usage when processing heavily-retouched photos
• Face recognition processing

Unfortunately, though, Apple is still warning that Aperture 3 may eat up your entire hard drive during the upgrade process, claiming that users experiencing problems need to temporarily shift their library to a different hard drive with more space. Since I’ve talked to some people who’ve seen terrabyte drives fill up completely during the Aperture 3 upgrade process, this isn’t entirely welcome news.

Gamers looking for a solid digital delivery platform on the Mac are notoriously hard up. Actually, scratch that: Mac gamers are notoriously hard up.

The good news here, then, is that recent betas of Valve Software’s popular Steam delivery system contain files that strongly hint that the “App Store for Windows Games” service is coming to OS X. These files are a new “osx.menu” file and graphics for Mac window buttons.

The bad news, unfortunately, is it’s not likely to make much difference: one of the reasons Steam is so great on Windows is because it has tens of thousands of games available for it. The library on the Mac is far more paltry, and OS X gamers are simply better off using Steam through Boot Camp to play the latest games than waiting two to four years for a company to maybe get around to releasing a sloppy OS X port of a game the PC world has already forgotten about.

Steam’s a great service, so I don’t doubt it’ll be useful… but publishers aren’t getting any more serious about OS X as a gaming platform. If you’re not on iPhone OS, Apple gaming is just pretty much dead. The best can be said about this development is that it may indicate that Valve is interested in porting its own games to OS X, all of which require Steam in order to run. Team Fortress 2 or Portal on the Mac is a pretty thought, but hardly likely to revolutionize anything.

Office for Mac isn’t exactly a software suite most Apple fans pick up unless they absolutely have to, but if you don’t mind compromising your integrity a little bit, you can pimp Office on Twitter a little bit and automatically enter yourself into a drawing to win one of two 2.53GHz, 15-inch MacBook Pros.

All you need to do is either follow officeformac on Twitter, or retweet @officeformac while including the #officeformac hashtag. With a little bit of luck, you’ll win one of the garishly repainted, Office-branded MacBook Pros.

Unfortunately, it’s only open to residents of the US or Canada, which means Microsoft is missing a golden opportunity to bribe at least this Germany-based Apple blogger into saying some good things about their products. If you’re interested, you better get moving: the give-away ends on Thursday.

[via TUAW]

Esquire magazine has a marvelous profile of film critic Roger Ebert, who has lost his lower jaw and voice box after several years of cancer treatments.

Having lost the ability to speak, Ebert is pouring himself into writing instead.

His astonishing online journal runs to more than 500,000 words on topics as disparate as his life, the afterlife (none-he’s atheist), alcoholism, travel, books, and friends, living and dead.

To communicate in everyday life, Ebert uses text-to-speech on his MacBook Pro, Stephen Hawking-style.