I rarely write about topics directly relating to the blog (I try to keep the feed as squeeky clean as possible), but I just wanted to update you on a couple of things.
- I’ve updated the layout a bit, with the new release of version 2.2 of Wordpress, I’m now forced to use these new Widgets rather than the old K2 Sidebar modules, so there are a couple old ones that are no longer being used. I also changed the header image, as you can see I didn’t do much work. I just cropped the default Mac OS X background picture. In addition to that, I am now using K2 nightlies (in the geek world this is known as living on the edge). If you have or are experiencing any problems while these updates take place, I apologize
- If you want to help support the blog, you can now contribute a post. I’ve opened up registration to everyone, and everyone is now an editor by default. You can’t actually publish the posts but you can make drafts. It’s all clearly explained here.
- For a brief while a couple of months back, Digg blocked stories from this site from being submitted. I’ve since gotten in contact with them and they have decided to unblock it. Speaking of which, if you hadn’t noticed, each post now has a “Share This” link which you can use to submit any article to a series of social networking services, without even opening up a seperate page. Give it a try, Alex King did a really excellent job.
Ever wonder if those spiffy new Universal binaries take up more space? Well it turns out they do, a lot. What do you do if you don’t want a Universal binary but that’s all they offer? Try Xslimmer.
XSlimmer serves two functions: removing unwanted languages from your applications, and removing the unused portions of the applications. For instance, if you’re on a PowerPC machine, it will remove the Intel binaries, and vice-versa. If you’re on an Intel machine and the only binary available for the application is PowerPC, the application is smart enough not to remove that portion (in case you want to run it in Rosetta).
To speed up the slimming, there’s an “App Finder Genie” in Xslimmer, similar what’s seen in AppZapper. It will go through all of your applications, find which ones can be slimmed, and if they cannot it will tell you why. Sometimes applications won’t work if you slim them, so to fix this problem the app automatically downloads a blacklist, which is contributed by the users. If you have applications that are hard to install/download again, I would advise not to slim them as the blacklist info may be incomplete.
XSlimmer costs a very reasonable $11.95, though there are other apps such as Monolingual which serve the same purpose for free. XSlimmer, however, has a much nicer interface.
Website
Direct Download (1.7MB)
Yes, iPhoto for PDFs. Those aren’t my words, they are the words of the developer, and that’s probably the best way to describe it. The concept behind Yep is to tag, name, and organize all of your PDF files. This may sound simple, but the reason it’s so useful is because of the intuitive navigation that far exceeds that of the old system of folders. There of course is the web 2.0 way of tagging the PDF files, which can be used in “smart collections”, or you can just use regular collections (which is just a fancy way of saying folders).
Now that you have the basic concept, you might like to know about some of the more advanced features. For one, it has the ability to auto-tag items, which is unbelievably useful. This way you don’t have to go through each and every PDF item and tag it, instead it goes ahead and does it for you. Of course what good is tagging if you don’t have a tag cloud? Yep keeps an alphabetized list of all of your tags in the left pane of the window, and the more documents with each tag, the bigger the tag will be. As you mouse over each tag, Yep will show you which documents have that tag. The app can also be directly integrated with scanner software, either 3rd-party, TWAIN, or ImageCapture. So for instance, if you wanted to scan in some business records, or receipts it would be a breeze.
If you’re working with PDFs on a regular basis, then this is a great application, otherwise it’s not that helpful for people who use Pages or Word Documents. If the developers were able to integrate support for those types of files, then I’m sure this would be a must-have for any Mac user.
Yep
For anyone who wants to do movie conversion, this app is a godsend. As long as I’ve had a Mac I’ve been trying to figure out ways to convert movies easily, especially wmv and avi formats. When this application showed up in the MacUpdate RSS feed, I was skeptical at first. The application is only $15, (more than reasonably priced in my humble opinion), and pretty much any mainstream format you can think of can be used as a source of input.
Another reason this app caught my eye is the very simplistic interface. Many times the case with audio/video conversion apps, you’ll be pummeled with tons of options you don’t want. Sometimes you just want to convert a file, and not have to deal with all the extra stuff. As you can see below, this is exactly how the app works.
Recently the developer added support for flv videos and optimized it for multi-core and multi-processor systems. I should mention that the one problem I encountered while using it was a wmv file I tried to convert became grainy in some areas of the video. I did not try every type of input, but m4v, mp4, avi, and flv all worked fine.
Types of Input: asf, avi, flv, m4v, mp4, mpg, mpeg, mov, nsv, vob, wmv
Types of Output: mp4, mpg
Demo Download (3.9MB)
Purchase
Website
There are quite a few backup utilities for Mac OS X, mostly designed specifically for cloning or completely duplicating your hard drive. But have you ever wanted to quickly backup a couple sources of information, such as your iTunes Music, your widgets, or your Safari information? SmartBackup is the application that is perfect for just that.
SmartBackup has a beautiful, very “Mac” interface. It has a dark unified interface, and a drop-down opaque overlay with a progress bar. You can backup information based on a list of “sources”, in addition to the ones mentioned before there are Keychains, iPhoto files, Address Book files, pretty much the standard Mac applications. Perhaps the most interesting source is the ability to backup Smart Folders. Smart Folders are of course the dynamic spotlight folders that list the files on your computer based on certain conditions and filters. These sources don’t have to be backed up individually, they are added to the list of backup items.
One useful feature is “Auto Pilot”. If you have turned the feature on, when you start up SmartBackup, it starts an automatic backup after 10 seconds, then quits. This reduces the entire backup process to launching the application. Pretty impressive. Once your files are backed up, you can easily restore them all with one click of the mouse.
SmartBackup is already compatible with the upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Now while it may not be the app you should use to backup your entire hard drive, it knows what it’s supposed to do, what it can do, and it does it well.
Website
Direct Download (607KB)
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