software - page 21

Yesterday, Skype 5.0 dropped onto the PC for Windows users, bringing Facebook integration and group video calling into the mix. That update is not yet available for the Mac, but according to a post on Skype’s official blog, a new version of the popular VoIP application is coming to OS X soon.

I’m worried, though. In the blog post, Skype alarmingly mentions a “complete overhaul, both in terms of the way it looks, and in terms of functionality.”

Look, Skype isn’t a very well designed app by Mac standards, I agree… but have you ever seen the absolutely unidentifiable puddle of mashed up design elements that comprises the Windows interface? If you’ve got a minute, I’ve got an anecdote that might help describe it if you haven’t.

With all due respect, this was originally intended to be a gallery post dedicated to discovering the magic of MC Escher, a 99¢ app that brings users hi-res imagery of the artwork that’s decorated millions of dorm rooms and student apartments worldwide over the years. The app incudes two mindbending games as well, and for a buck, it’s got to be good value. MC Escher on the iPhone and iPad — how could you go wrong?

However, digging around for something to say about the Escher app, iFractal surfaced. It’s a free app that allows users to play around with renderings of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets of images derived from mathematical visualization theory. There’s also Fractals, a $2.99 app that seems to offer the same thing, with perhaps a finer manipulative granularity — but in the end, these apps warrant a gallery.

The Amazon iPhone app received an update Tuesday, allowing iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 users to scan barcodes anywhere and instantly compare prices on the scanned item at amazon.com.

Using the device’s camera, users of the free app can point at a barcode out in brick-and-mortar land and know within seconds whether Amazon has a better deal on offer.

Apple released a 3rd beta build for iOS 4.2 on Tuesday, along with a 2nd for iTunes 10.1. It looks as though new builds are coming at roughly two week intervals at this point.

People who have been desperate to turn friends into badgers – your prayers have finally, finally been answered.

Because for you, Badger Face is likely to be the best dollar you’ve ever spent on an iPhone/iPod touch application with turning-people-into-badgers functionality.

For the rest of us? Well, for the rest of us, Badger Face will make us momentarily double-take as we browse the App Store for amazing stuff. It will make us choke on our badger burgers as we read the app description. Badger Face is simultaneously the weirdest thing we have seen this week, and it is this week’s Best (Badger-Related) Thing Ever.

Who knows what will come next? The user comments suggest Dinosaur Face, but why stop there? What about Panda Face? Squirrel Face? Unicorn Face? And for A-Team fans, Face Face?

Transmit is a veteran FTP application for the Mac. So veteran, you can still download a version of it for Mac OS 9 if you want to.

In a market so crammed with competitors, what makes this particular FTP app stand out from all others? Let me count the ways…

Tweet Library by Manton Reece is something special, and I think one of a very tiny handful of Twitter clients – not just on the iPad, but on all manner of platforms – that add something genuinely new.

Sparrow is a new email client for OS X, which takes a fresh approach to displaying and managing email.

Take a look at the litigious melee going on among companies trying to squeeze profits out of the mobile communications landscape. It’s a wonder we have phones and operating systems at all, isn’t it?

Interestingly, the one suit against Google by Oracle is somewhat misleading, given that many of the suits represented by the flying arrows in the graphic relate to Google’s Android operating system, including all of the ones filed by Microsoft.

Microsoft, with its Windows Mobile 7 OS about to ship, is asserting intellectual property infringement cases against Motorola and HTC, claiming Google’s Android operating system runs afoul of patents it holds for several important tasks handled by today’s new generation of smart phones. Specifically the software giant says Android copies its patented methods for handling email, contacts and calendar synchronisation, scheduling meetings and notifying applications of changes in signal and battery strength.

Via [The Guardian]

Well, it took nearly a year, gut Google finally put Goggles into its mobile search app for the iPhone, according to a blog post Tuesday.

A feature Android users have enjoyed since last December, Goggles allows a Google mobile Search user to tap on the camera button to search using Goggles. The blog post said “Goggles will analyze the image and highlight the objects it recognizes — just click on them to find out more.”

The feature remains a Google Labs project and thus should evolve and improve with time. It works reasonably well, according to Google, for things such as landmarks, logos, and products, but not so well yet for animals or food.

Via [TechCrunch] [iTunes app link]

Remember this video from a week or so ago? It was made by the people at London’s BERG studio for people at advertising agency Dentsu, as part of a wider project called “Making Future Magic”.

BERG hit on the idea of breaking words and pictures into slices which are displayed on an iPad screen one at a time. If you capture this display with a long exposure on your camera, you get 3D words and images extruded into thin air.

And now the rest of us can join in the fun, with a $1 app for iPhone and iPad, called Holo-Paint.

When Mozilla finally releases Firefox 4.0 for OS X, Mac users might notice that browsing has gotten quite a bit snappier for them, as it now looks as if hardware acceleration may, at long last, be coming to Firefox for the Mac.

It’s far from certain, though. The next beta of Firefox 4.0, b7, is the last before feature freeze kicks in on the latest version of the popular alternative browser… and Mozilla’s OS X software engineers have just decided to try to sneak it in.

The tweet says it all: I’m back using Camino after switching to Safari when version 5 was released back in July.

Although I appreciate Safari’s speed while browsing, and the variety of extensions on offer was wonderful to see, there was one problem that drove me back to Camino: crashes and beachballs.

Qwiki, a startup offering a new way to get informed, won the $50,000 first prize and Disrupt Cup at the 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Wendesday.

Founded by Doug Imbruce, a self-described recovering software engineer, and Louis Monier, sometimes called the Father of Web Search for his role as the founder of AltaVista, Qwiki has the ubernerd community all aflutter over the prospects for its automagical transformation of the way we search for and obtain information. Combining text, audio, video, and images presented together in a seamless interface, Qwiki is meant to generate dynamic movies of whatever a user searches for.

The company’s software is designed to run on the web as well as in apps on mobile devices. Qwiki crawls data covering millions of topics and presents it to a user in an engaging and visual way, which, as it turns out, plays quite nicely with the super-portable, visually oriented attributes of the iPad.

The company’s official presentation at TCDisrupt showed only a concept video of an iPhone wake-up app based on the service, and a working prototype running on a laptop in Flash. As the video above shows, however, their iPad prototype that remains in development offers tantalizing possibilities.

The software engineer who showed this little glimpse backstage at the conference seemed pretty stoked about it, anyway.

Spirited Away is useful for people who like to focus. It just does one simple job. You’ll either love it, or be completely baffled by it.

It runs in the background, and hides all applications other than the one you’re using. That’s it.

So, if you switch to Mail halfway through working on your spreadsheet, Spirited Away hides the spreadsheet – and your chat client, your browser, your Skype window, everything else that isn’t Mail. It all just disappears.

So why would you want this? Well, removing visual clutter on screen can be helpful for people. It means you can concentrate your mind on the task at hand, and not allow it to be distracted by other stuff. It’s probably not much use if you’re just messing about, but if you want to actually get some work done, it comes into its own.

And it’s flexible enough to bend its own rules, if that’s what you want from it. If you’d like all the other application windows hidden except your iChat window, or except iTunes – well, you can tell it to leave those apps alone.

You might hate the idea of Spirited Away. You might think it’s a long way from being essential. But it’s essential to some of us, and might be essential to some of you, too.

(You’re reading the 15th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)

One of the biggest problems with physical media is that it breaks. As soon as your DVD gets a couple scratches it’s rendered un-usable and worthless. Copying a DVD with encryption isn’t as easy as it should be. The good news is that with this walkthrough Cult of Mac will show you how to do it.

PlainText is the latest text app from Hog Bay Software‘s Jesse Grosjean.

Jesse, as many of you will know, is the genius behind several other apps for iOS and the desktop, including WriteRoom and TaskPaper.

PlainText is very similar to, but not exactly the same as, another of his apps called SimpleText. Where SimpleText was built to sync with a home-made service called simpletext.ws, PlainText has been built from scratch to sync with Dropbox.

PlainText is a simple text writing tool for iPhone and iPad. It will sync with Dropbox, and includes support for TextExpander snippets if you use them. It’s free, supported by adverts. If you want to switch them off, you can for a one-off payment of $4.99.

Secrets is a preference pane rather than an app, so once you’ve installed it, you’ll find it inside System Preferences, not in your Applications folder.

What is it? Think of it as “System Preferences Plus”. Secrets gives you point-and-click access to hundreds of hidden preferences in OS X and many applications. Without Secrets, the only way of changing these settings is by using a Terminal window and typing stuff like “defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE” (which is the secret setting for hiding the Ping drop-down menu in iTunes.)

So if you’d rather avoid having to mess around with geekery like that, Secrets is your friend. You can browse through all the hidden preferences on your system, or filter them by application. So if you want Mail to always display messages in plain text, or if you want Safari’s tab bar to stay in view even when there’s only one tab open, or if you want to change how often Time Machine does its backups – well, you can change all of those, and loads more, inside Secrets.

It’s free to download, and frequently updated with new items as and when Apple and third party developers push out updates to software packages.

If you’re using iTunes and you have a lot of music, it’s not that easy to browse through many hundreds of albums and select one to listen to.

For those of us who still like to listen to entire albums, there are ways to pluck one album at random from your library and get iTunes to play it.

The first is to grab this script from Doug’s AppleScripts. It will do the job perfectly well.

The second, and my new favorite way, is to use the optional Powerpack add-on to Alfred and the “Random Album” command you’ll find there (see screenshot above).

I’m enjoying using this because it’s very quick and simple. Alfred has to create its own iTunes playlist, which gets instantly re-populated with a new album’s worth of tracks every time you activate the command – which, since you’re using Alfred, only takes a couple of keystrokes.

Fuse Box, the company behind some of the best collaboration tools on the Internet, announced this week the arrival of Fuze Meeting, the first web conferencing service that allows users to run a meeting from an iPad. Dubbed ‘meetings in a pinch,’ the Fuze Meeting app (iTunes link) supports Keynote presentations on and off the iPad, content uploads from third party apps such as Dropbox and SuharySync, and full duplex in-app VoIP so users don’t even need headphones to join a meeting.

Some of the cooler features supported by the app include support for HD video content and Fuze Box’s iPoint™ Laser Technology that transforms a user’s finger into a digital laser pointer, viewable by all meeting participants. Cloud storage enables users to pull any document or file directly from the server and also add content from the iPad straight into a meeting, then store it on the cloud for later. Both hosts and attendees can share, control, and present content from their iPad.

Chat integration with AIM, Yahoo, Google, OCS and others allows users to see who is online and bring them into a meeting from wherever they are and in-app account creation lets users meet exclusively from the iPad without ever booting up a desktop PC –- making the app a truly mobile solution.

Users who download the app before October 15 can use an upgraded version of the app free for 30 days, after which, accounts will convert to the always free lite account.

iBooks and games may be currently popular apps for the iPad, but if Apple’s latest game-changing device is going to have real legs it will one day have to be seen as a productivity tool. And productivity means business. The success of Fuze Meeting should be a good indicator of iPad’s potential value in the academic and enterprise spaces.

Adobe has announced the release of new video and photo editing packages.

Photoshop Elements is upgraded to version 9, and its video editing cousin Premiere Elements 9 is released as an OS X application for the first time.

Separately, they will cost you $99 each, or you can buy them both together for $149.

What do you get for your money? Well in Photoshop Elements, Adobe promises some off-shoots of the Content Aware Fill feature found in Photoshop, making it easy to edit and repair photos and have the gaps filled in realistically and automatically. The Organizer feature and Auto-Analyzer are designed to make managing large image collections easy, and there’s new face recognition technology.

Elements users might like to check out the official Facebook pages where Adobe is posting lots of tips and how-tos.

In Premiere Elements, you’ll find the same Organizer alongside tools for image stabilization and color correction.

Both applications offer access to Adobe Plus, an online backup and storage service that gives you 20GB of space for $50/year.

We all like our eyes. What a shame we subject them to such an endless onslaught of photons from computer screens all day long.

F.lux is an app designed to make your eyes feel a little more comfortable while working on a computer.

Much as I love Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series of tongue-in-cheek horror films, and much as I have tried to emulate my virtues after that of its protagonist Deadite slayer Ash Williams, I have never found any of the myriad efforts to translate Army of Darkness‘ appeal to the video game form to be worth anything besides a derisive snort.

So I feel a little foolish getting so excited by word coming from Backflip Studios that they will be releasing a game based on Army of Darkness to the App Store early in 2011.

There’s almost no details so far, except that it will be a tower defense game, which is a surprising but remarkably appropriate choice, and you can expect several hours of Bruce Campbell’s snarling, macho and downright hysterical catch phrases as you blow hole after hole through the medieval dead with your trusty boomstick. Don’t bone this up, Backflip!

With National Novel Writing Month coming up this November, it would already be a good a time as any to plug our third entry in our Mac Essentials list, the incredible novelist’s tool Scrivener… but the imminent arrival of version 2.0, a new blog update explaining the new version’s added features and a last chance to get Scrivener at its old, cheaper price make it a no brainer.

What to expect in Scrivener 2.0? The lengthy list of new features is too big to fully cover, but in the upcoming version, you can expect to find significant improvements to the corkboard mode, including freehand movement of note cards; a revised text editor that includes a Pages-style format ribbon and a page layout view, as well as an Ommwriter-style image background in full screen mode; multiple project notes; editable QuickReference panels; document collections; custom templates and icons; the ability to sync with Simplenote and ePub support to read your new masterpiece on the iPhone, iPad or just self-publish it.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As a major new version, Scrivener 2.0 is getting a price bump to $45. Anyone who bought Scrivener 1.0 since August 15th gets the upgrade for free, while older customers must pay a $25 upgrade free.

The good news is that until Friday, September 17th, you can still buy Scrivener at its old price of $39.95… and since you will have bought it after August 15th, that’ll make you eligible for a free upgrade to 2.0 when it lands in October, giving you an entire month to get comfortable with the new features before NaNoWriMo.

Avid will soon begin offering packages of its M-Audio branded audio hardware bundled with an entry-level package of its Pro Tools recording software that could well make a dent in the progress Apple has lately made with Garage Band.

Three offerings priced under $130 will make it easy for first-time Pro Tools users to easily create and record music at home using Avid’s Key, Recording and Vocal studio products with the included Pro Tools SE recording software. Whatever Pro Tools SE may lack in Garage Band’s take-you-by-the-hand user friendliness, it more than makes up for in multi-track recording capability and direct compatibility with higher-end professional grade Pro Tools installations.

Recent updates to Apple’s iLife suite of software included a revamped, juiced up version of Garage Band with well-received interactive learning features that solidified the software’s status as a highly capable tool for creating great-sounding recordings at home. But soon it will become possible to do the same things using an inexpensive version of Pro Tools — with the resulting tracks being readable and usable by the same more expensive studio versions of Pro Tools used by nearly every major recording facility in the world today.