Closing Shop for Now
Today is an unfortunate day. None of the few writers that replied has shown anything worthwhile. They did not get back to me or didn't write a review as promised. Under those circumstances my only option is to close this blog for the time being. I have one last review from Brendan that I will put up in the following days, but after that that's it for now. Maybe I will find the time to write here again in the future. I sincerely hope so, because although this was a short endeavour it was fun and the feedback I got was great. Brendan got a job as writer at Macworld from this, so I guess it wasn't for nothing.
I bid you all a good time and you Brendan I wish the best of luck with your future writings at Macworld or any other site.
Read more...What Is Happening Here? Aka. Writers Wanted
As some of you might have noticed, our post frequency has slowed down considerably. Both Brendan and I don't have the time we would like to have to put into this blog at the moment. Writing detailed reviews is something that takes quite a bit of time, because we have to test a software for a while to be able to write an objective review about it. And as this site is a non-profit project and we both have demanding day jobs time gets a precious commodity.
But we both believe in this site and think that we have something worthy of preservation here. That is why, instead of giving up, we want to expand. Yes, you heard right. We would like to get one or two additional writers on board that help us to fill this blog with more regular content.
A successful prospect would be an Apple aficionado that likes to talk about Mac and iPhone software. You don't have to be a professional writer, just someone passionate about getting the word out for great software. The frequency we expect from you is about one post every week.
We cannot offer you payment as we ourselves don't get any. What we can offer, is that you sometimes get the inside view on new software developments and that you will be able to test closed betas. For example, we are testing the newest release of Tweetie, Eventbox and maybe LittleSnapper Touch at the moment. If that sort of thing gets you all fidgety, please drop us a line with the subject "Spinning Beachball Writer".
Ideally, you should have a few writing samples so we can get an idea of your writing style and a short CV so we get to know you a little better. If you don’t have anything written yet, you might offer to write a test review for us. Please contact us for the review guidelines.
Read more...Site Misconfiguration Leads to Unaccessible Site
Yesterday, a little error crept into our site configuration, which lead to a password prompt when someone tried to access the site. We have corrected it this morning and offer our deepest apologies if you have problems reading the site yesterday. We hope everything is working again. If you still have problems with the site let us know via the contact form or shoot me an e-mail at: a (dot) kucera (at) babylondreams (dot) de
Read more...iVolume
Recently I cleaned up our household's iTunes library. I merged two, more or less, similar libraries, cleaned out duplicates, assigned cover art, checked the tags and I used a little tool called iVolume to level out the volume of my entire library. Now I am able to listen to random tracks without constantly adjusting the volume just because the individual levels of the tracks are way off.
Read more...New Commenting System — Disqus
Just a quick heads up everybody. I am not very happy with the current commenting system, JS-Kit and I will try to implement a new system over the weekend called Disqus. Commenting might be flakey during the next few days, but the general site content should not suffer. Everything is supposed to be back to normal on Monday. Please bear with me.
I will leave the JS-Kit code in the old posts, so the comments will still work for now. At a later date I will probably merge those older comments with the posts and disable commenting on them.
Read more...Formulate Pro — Filling Things Out
Today I wanted to talk about a little program that you might not need to use very often, but when you need it it is worth its weight in gold. Did you ever have to fill out forms? Most of the time they come as PDF, but sometimes it is just a plain image. There are a few tools out there that allow you to fill out forms. Some of them cost a bit like PDFpen, PDFClerk or PDF Studio. Other really are costly, like Adobe's Acrobat. But for people like you and me, that occasionally need to fill out a form these are not really reasonable. Formulate Pro to the rescue! It does a lot of what the pricier tools do, but for free. In fact, it is even open source.
Read more...Macworld 2009 Keynote
As you might know, at the moment there is this little conference called Macworld Expo. Lots of new things are announced there, among others iLife'09, iWork'09 and a new 17" MacBook Pro.
To learn more about these new announcements watch the Keynote by Phil Schiller, Apple's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing. It is 1,5 hours long and shows off the new features of these applications. some of them a very cool.
Read more...AppCleaner — Un-Installer for the Masses
Sorry for being a bit behind schedule. Unfortunately, I have been caught by a cold and it won't let me go. Anyways… todays review will be a short one as well, simply because the application is pretty simple to use. I am talking about AppCleaner by FreeMacSoft a small very effective tool to un-install Mac OS X applications. "Un-install applications?", you ask? But isn't the way to un-install on a Mac to simply delete the program? Unfortunately, that is not true.
Read more...Happy New Year 2009
Hello dear readers. We hope you had a very nice New Year's Eve and wish you all the best for 2009.
We will take up regular business next week with two articles per week as before. Look forward to lots of nice application reviews and more giveaways.
Read more...Merry Christmas Everybody
We wish you, our readers, a very nice holiday season. Enjoy your time with the family and all the good food. We will do the same.
For the next few days there won't be any new reviews, simply because I am away from the computer and enjoy a bit of free time. I expect to resume posting either next week or in the new year. Until then…
MacCleanse — Ajax for Your System
If you are like me, you like your system to be lean and mean. Empty the Trash right after throwing something in. Keeping folders in order, cleaning out unnecessary baggage when you get the chance. Well, I do that all the time. Deleting applications with AppZapper, slimming my software with xSlimmer. You could say, that I have a very clean system. Still, when I tried out MacCleanse from Koingo Software, I managed to get nearly 1GB of my precious drive space back. Not too shabby.
Read more...1Password — Password Management Made Easy
Today I am going to talk about a little application that is very dear to me. In fact I use it several dozen times a day. So please excuse me, if I sound less objective, because I have a little man crush on 1Password by Agile Web Solutions.
So… 1Password. As the name already tells you, it is a password manager. You know, it manages your dozens of passwords. You do have different passwords for all your accounts, right? If not, it is time you start now. In this day and age it is vital, that your accounts are reasonably well protected of hackers and phishers.
Read more...Update: OS X 10.5.6 Hits the Streets
Apple has release the software update to OS X 10.5.6 into the wild. Get it by running Software Update or via the download link.
Read more...MacPilot
As I have written in a previous post, several developers agreed to help me out when I launched the blog. They provided me with giveaway licenses for several of their popular products. One of these developers is Koingo Software. They have a whole array of different products, which we will be looking at in the coming weeks. The first application I want to talk about today is called MacPilot.
Read more...Thank You Developers
I just wanted to give a little thank you to some very supportive developers. The guys at Realmac Software, Mariner Software, Koingo Software and Agile Web Solutions were nice enough to provide me with giveaway licenses for a lot of their products. I will be reviewing these products in the coming articles (except LittleSnapper, which I already did in my first review) and each review will be accompanied by the according giveaway license.
I think it is a great feat of the Mac software community to support the small guy. I don't have a big name and the blog was not even there when I asked those developers about their support. Nevertheless, these guys showed great enthusiasm and were eager to help me out. Some of them going overboard and providing me with extra licenses that I didn't even ask for.
So to make things short. Thank you guys for your support. I greatly appreciate it.
Read more...LittleSnapper — a New Toy on the Block
Are you the sort of guy who likes to keep images in order? Maybe it would be good to have a nice way to organize websites and screenshots? Despair not! LittleSnapper by Realmac Software has been created for exactly this purpose.
Maybe you have used Skitch
before or just did plain old screenshots
via Grab.app, Preview.app or shortcuts. LittleSnapper does the
same and more. It offers a convenient way to organize your precious
screenshots. With an interface quite similar to iPhoto, you can
create plain folders, Smart Folders and Collections. Of course,
LittleSnitch LittleSnapper also offers tags and conveniently
saves the URL when creating snapshots from a web page. In fact,
LittleSnitch LittleSnapper works quite well when creating
web snaps (as they are called by Realmac Software) and even comes
with its own web service that let's you easily share your images
with the world.
First Post
Well, first posts are never great to write. So let's just wait for the second post.
Read more...