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Posts tagged mac

Posted 6 months ago

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XtraFinder is awesome freeness

I don’t typically plug Mac apps (though I use them daily), but Mac power-users wanting some improvements to the Finder, but without too much overkill or memory hogging,  should check out XtraFinder. It’s free and works with Mac OS 10.6+.

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Posted 1 year ago

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polkast ain't pokey

Product Recommendation: I just tried polkast for my mac and iOS devices and must say it works great (at least on wi-fi). Fast, simple and currently free. polkast shares between Macs, PCs, iOS and Android devices so it’s really handy.

What’s the big deal? Easy filesharing between my Mac and iOS devices has always been a bit of a pain (and slow). It required a full iTunes sync, using a service like Dropbox, or app like ReaddleDocs. Now I can quickly share a folder and view them on ALL my devices.

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Posted 1 year ago

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Yay! Pixelmator 2.0 has been released! Hopefully people who don’t want the complexity of Photoshop, or the price, will have a good alternative on the Mac; I know all the apps I’ve tried have fallen way short, including Pixelmator 1.0, which while pretty, wasn’t polished enough for my needs. Version 2.0 looks like a huge evolution. I’ll wait to see what the reviews say.  The long search is never over (a bit of backstory)… Before I became a Photoshop whiz, back in the early 1990s I relied on an awesome little Mac app called ColorIt! I designed quite a few logos, illustrations and even websites using it. Alas, it never really evolved so I ditched it. Likewise, for a short while — before Steve Jobs returned to SAVE Apple — I tried using Windows apps. The only one I ever found I liked was called Xara. Quirky it was, but still quite amazing at the time and cool because it was both a vector and raster app in one.  Of course when Mac OS X arrived I could rely on my Mac again. Since then, I’ve almost given up trying to find a Photoshop alternative because in my biz it’s the industry standard. My issue isn’t with the Photoshop itself — though it is absurdly obtuse — but are with the pricing and the radical changes they make with each version to the UI, so I have relearn it again. I’m still looking for a lean-an-mean photo retouching app. Hopefully Pixelmator 2.0 is it.

Yay! Pixelmator 2.0 has been released! Hopefully people who don’t want the complexity of Photoshop, or the price, will have a good alternative on the Mac; I know all the apps I’ve tried have fallen way short, including Pixelmator 1.0, which while pretty, wasn’t polished enough for my needs. Version 2.0 looks like a huge evolution. I’ll wait to see what the reviews say. 

The long search is never over (a bit of backstory)…

Before I became a Photoshop whiz, back in the early 1990s I relied on an awesome little Mac app called ColorIt! I designed quite a few logos, illustrations and even websites using it. Alas, it never really evolved so I ditched it. Likewise, for a short while — before Steve Jobs returned to SAVE Apple — I tried using Windows apps. The only one I ever found I liked was called Xara. Quirky it was, but still quite amazing at the time and cool because it was both a vector and raster app in one.  Of course when Mac OS X arrived I could rely on my Mac again. Since then, I’ve almost given up trying to find a Photoshop alternative because in my biz it’s the industry standard. My issue isn’t with the Photoshop itself — though it is absurdly obtuse — but are with the pricing and the radical changes they make with each version to the UI, so I have relearn it again.

I’m still looking for a lean-an-mean photo retouching app. Hopefully Pixelmator 2.0 is it.

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Posted 1 year ago

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Another HTML5 animation tool arrives

Another HTML 5 + CSS tool has come to the Mac with Purple. This looks to be a direct competitor to the excellent indie app Hype. I’ve been learning Hype, but have yet to put it to a client project. Purple looks promising as well and follows a different UI/animation approach.

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Posted 1 year ago

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.99 cents and a copy of the Apple Pages is all you need to make great eBooks. Smashing Magazine’s How to Create and eBook Using Apple Pages will walk you through all the steps of producing quality PDF, ePub and Mobipocket formats easy as pie. I should know, I’m creating my first Pages designed eBook right now.

.99 cents and a copy of the Apple Pages is all you need to make great eBooks. Smashing Magazine’s How to Create and eBook Using Apple Pages will walk you through all the steps of producing quality PDF, ePub and Mobipocket formats easy as pie. I should know, I’m creating my first Pages designed eBook right now.

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Posted 1 year ago

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Designers/Devs beware, Adobe apps might feel the Lion's bite

This is becoming annoying, yet common scenario with Adobe; as usual, Mac designers/developers who use Adobe products to make their living will YET AGAIN be advised not to upgrade to OS X Lion anytime soon (see TUAW’s post).

Even though early devs of Lion have been out for a long while, Adobe apps — the ones you pay hundreds to thousands of dollars for and rely on to make a living — don’t work well initially with the new OS, so you’re stuck waiting for Adobe patches or in some cases pay-for upgrades if you want to upgrade your OS. I’m sure most, but not all, issues will be fixed, but this seems really post facto from a top tier software company. :(

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Posted 1 year ago

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Today the Lion is let out of the cage

For those of us who use Mac (that’s me since 1984 BTW), we’ll be treated to the next version of Apple’s Mac OS X code-named Lion. This upgrade is being priced and delivered quite differently than recent upgrades and promises to have lovers and haters. I could talk about the new features, but not having tried it, I’ll leave it to the experts at MacWorld to give you the initial skinny. Suffice it to say $30 is a good deal for an upgrade.

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Posted 1 year ago

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FireFox 5 released in the wild

If you’ve blinked recently, you may not know that FireFox 4 even existed, but it did for a very short time. Now FireFox 5 has released and NOT as a beta, but as a stable release. It brings a bevy of features that v4 had, plus some others, so check out all the new features. Key “user” features include App tabs and Panorama switching, plus plenty of tech/developer stuff underneath. Also, if you’re an iOS or Android user, you can sync bookmarks with you computer. All good stuff for a browser that’s been crawling along as Chrome, Safari, Opera and even IE9 have been pushing hard.

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