About The Spinning Beachball
The Spinning Beachball opened up its door in December 2008. The idea behind the site is to get my personal urge to recommend apps expressed somehow. I am a Mac user since 2006 and have since really digged into the inner workings and made the system my own. Which — in contrast to Windows — actually gives me a more stable system.
Of course, to get the system to perform best, you need a couple of applications that support you in your daily workflow. On The Spinning Beachball I try to provide an overview of OS X software that I find great and of course will allow you to follow me along on my path to discover and test new applications.
The initial post frequency will be around two posts per week, while I try to get all the bumps smoothed out. If you notice anything that is not working as expected, please let me know.
About the authors
Alexander Kucera — Chief Honcho
My name is Alexander Kucera. I am a 29 years old guy from Germany,
who is normally working in the visual effects industry for big
visual effects movies and the likes. I have my own visual effects
company called BabylonDreams together with my
partner Monika Breß.
In my spare time, I am a contributor to the nationwide German
Professional Production Magazine, where I cover events
and the occasional international convention.
My first contact with Mac computers was in 2005, when I was forced to work with several G5's on a movie project. I hated it.
Somehow Windows users seem to have a natural skill to make Mac OS X crash at every turn. Still, I was intrigued by the Unix core, as I had dabbled with Linux before and always liked the experience. When the first Intel machines arrived, I had no more excuses. I got me a nice and shiny MacBook Pro 17" and have never been happier with a machine.
Since then, I am constantly expanding my knowledge in all things Apple and have become a quite skilled Mac OS X user. And I don't even crash my machine anymore (or at least very rarely).
Brendan Wilhide — Writer
Brendan Wilhide writes about Apple, Mac software and technology here at The Spinning Beachball. He is an avid baseball and hockey fan and loves music. He also maintains a personal blog. He lives in the United States.
→ Read all of Brendan's articles
Advertising
If you are a developer of Mac software and want to advertise on this page please contact us with an offer. We greatly appreciate giveaway licenses that we can give to our readers.
Under no circumstances will the reviews be biased by sponsoring or advertising. If you want to advertise on this site or sponsor us with giveaway licenses, you will get brand awareness, but no skewed reviews.
Review Policy
The Spinning Beachball will present our own view on software and hardware. We don't pretend to be omniscient or objective. If we like something, we like it, if not, then not. We will however try to always present an application as unbiased as possible.
Reviews will always include the following:
- Overview (What does the program do?)
- Noteworthy Features and/or Disadvantages
- Summary
- Quick Info including the following:
- Pros and Contras
- Price
- Developer
- URL
Pros
- built in library
- native Mac GUI
- fast and intuitive
Contras
- expensive
- large memory footprint
Site Design and Browser compatibility
This site was created for the Mac community, therefor no extended testing was done for Linux or Windows browsers. We are aware that this site makes extended use of transparent PNG's which are not supported in Internet Explorer 6 and below. Anyone with a reasonably current browser should have no problems browsing the site though.
If there is a hiccup in the design, please let us know by telling us the name of the page, your operating system and the browser you used.
The Spinning Beachball's design was created by Alexander Kucera for Rapidweaver and is based on a work by kevinpottsdesign.com.