Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Thursday, June 30th, 2011 at 2:52 am
The Mac App store holds loads of top apps to boost creativity.
Here are 10 of the best.
Aperture - £45
Apple
Aperture is a real steal, especially for iPhoto users wanting to upgrade to something more powerful.
It boasts top photo-management tools, including the ability to upload to and manage albums on Flickr, Facebook and MobileMe and manage images by Places and Faces. It also boasts intuitive RAW-editing features and a top-notch interface, making Aperture an essential buy.
CameraBag Desktop - £8.99
Nevercenter Ltd
The Mac version of this iPhone's photo app, CameraBag Desktop is about adding old-school effects to your photos. The app is simple: open it up, load in an image and you can start applying the effects, including cross-processing, silver, instant and Helga.
All the filters are high quality, and you can combine them for even more interesting effects, creating custom filters to save and share with the CameraBag community.
Pixelmator - £35
Pixelmator
When you think of image-editing apps, Photoshop is the obvious one that springs to mind. But Pixelmator is certainly a worthy - and less expensive - rival for those wanting to make adjustments to their digital photographs and create digital paintings from scratch.
Pixelmator is packed with hugely powerful and familiar image-editing tools. From layers to blending modes and a host of professional tools to make complex selections, it's an extremely accomplished app that is both intuitive and refined. It's just a really good value, snappy, well-designed creative app.
Live Interior 3D Standard - £30
Belight Software
Ever wanted to create your dream room on your Mac? Well now you can. In fact, you can sketch out and plan the look of your entire home in 3D. It's simple: just enter the dimensions of your room and start adding furniture, floor and wall coverings at will - before you head off to the local DIY store.
The Pro edition gives more control over lighting, amongst other things. One thing this can also be used as is a storyboarding app - you can easily set up interior scenes before exporting for further editing.
Artboard - £12
Mapdiva
The advantage of vectors (paths-based) over raster (pixel-based) imagery can be enormous - literally. Working in vectors means your artwork can be scaled to any size without any loss in quality. The best-known vector app is Adobe's Illustrator - but it's also very pricey.
For £12 Artboard offers nowhere near the functionality or control of Illustrator, but it does bring some simple and easy-to-use Bézier drawing tools. It also has the ability to create 'styles' for future use - meaning you can specify stroke, fill and other attributes and easily re-apply these to new objects. Considering it's a 50th of the price of Illustrator, it's really not all that bad.
SketchMee - £4.99
Studio Mee
SketchMee is a fantastic application if you want to quickly create painterly versions of your photographs. A simple interface enables you to load in your photo, choose the crop and then specify the 'technique' (for example, coloured pencil) the amount of detail, the paper quality and the type of strokes.
The particularly clever part is that SketchMee uses vectors to create your sketch before converting it back to a JPEG format - meaning you can save out the result as a 16MP file, no matter what the size of your original was. This makes it perfect for taking into Photoshop (or indeed Pixelmator) and preparing for print to hang on your wall.
Hues - £2.99
Giant Comet
Hues, as the name suggests, is all about colour. More specifically, it enables you to sample (or take) a colour from any image or open app and get the HEX, RGB and HSL values. Essentially you can sample the colour of any pixel on your screen.
It's very quick to open, stores the last 25 colours sampled and you can copy the colour value to your clipboard after selection. Yes, it's very simple, but then again it's only £3!
Strata Design 3D SE - £30
Corastar
3D modelling and rendering isn't exactly the easiest skill to acquire - and usually involves buying an expensive piece of software. Strata Design 3D SE, however, at only £30, could be a great way to test your hand at 3D skills without a massive financial outlay.
There are some powerful modelling tools here, as well as great texturing and lighting functionality and a nice rendering engine. There's no animation toolset, however.
iStopMotion Express - £60
Boinx
Here's your chance to recreate the look of Morph and Wallace & Gromit with Boinx's stopmotion movie studio. Sure, you'll need to break out the plasticine (or dig out your old Star Wars figures) but what you have here is an app you can have endless fun with.
Set up your scene, plug in your camera and use the software to take snapshots of frames before piecing it all together to load into iMovie, Final Cut or your editor of choice. A great little app.
SketchBook Pro - £45
Autodesk
First thing's first: you'll need a graphics tablet to take full advantage of Autodesk's powerful sketching and digital painting app. For digital artists, SketchBook Pro is superb. It has a beautifully designed interface and a raft of tools for sketching ideas and creating full-blown digital artworks.
What we love about SketchBook Pro is that is feels like a digital canvas - it strips everything back but still gives you quick access to all the tools you need. In short, it's a masterpiece - and if you were lucky enough to get it when it was £18, well done you.
Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Thursday, June 9th, 2011 at 2:00 am
Acorn bills itself as the "image editor for humans" and it's easy to see why.
Rather than sprinkling myriad palettes around the screen or deluging you with a baffling amount of options, you get a single tools palette; this houses the app's selection of tools, context-sensitive settings for the current tool, and your image's layers.
On small screens, this 330-pixel-wide slab of interface might grate, but it's easily toggled with the Tab key and it works well on larger monitors.
The user-friendly nature of Acorn continues throughout the bulk of the application: tool settings are clearly labelled, and powerful filters can be applied in a separate window that enables you to chain multiple effects and save them as a preset.
Acorn 3 introduces Layer Styles, a feature that provides a stripped-down (and slightly less configurable) set of effects that are non-destructive, including shadows, blurs and colour settings. In both cases, the ability to preview how combinations of effects amend your image or layer is useful.
Acorn 3 also brings some big changes to vector objects, making it more suitable for interface design. For example, if anyone's designing for screen, then they can use the 'snap to pixels' option for shapes, to keep everything sharp. The ability to dynamically update corner radius and stroke settings for vector objects will also be a boon for web and interface designers.
Elsewhere, anyone working with shapes and text will be pleased to find these things can now be rotated, have gradients applied to them and be converted to Bezier objects. And Bezier curves are now also more flexible, since you can add and subtract points.
Selections are also much improved in Acorn 3, moving the app from being primarily about special effects and basic image manipulation to one suitable for complex bitmap editing.
The new Instant Alpha tool aims to work like a magic eraser — you click-drag to remove blocks of colour; this is fine for large, flat areas, but we found it lacking for making detailed selections. However, the new QuickMask deftly deals with complex masking, enabling you to 'paint' a mask and turn it into a selection.
However, the update's not quite without problems. While we appreciate the 'Color Correction' section of Acorn's documentation, some quick-fire tools for photography colour-correction would be welcome, and we also found Acorn's performance a problem on a Core 2 Duo iMac, especially with larger images and when compared to Photoshop. Also, PSD import is billed as 'improved', but remains variable.
But, criticising Acorn 3 too much would be a tad churlish, because this release represents a turning point for the application. We've long admired Acorn but have always wondered who it's actually for, largely due to its scattergun approach regarding features, offering a few insanely powerful tools but irksome omissions.
With the improvements in this release, it matches Pixelmator for basic image edits, betters all of its rivals regarding special effects, and is even starting to muscle in on Adobe Fireworks's turf regarding interface design.
It's not quite in MacFormat Choice Award territory yet, but Acorn now does more than enough to justify purchase for basic interface design, quick image edits and effects work – at least if you've a reasonably recent Mac to run it on. And for existing Acorn fans, the upgrade price is a total no-brainer.
Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Thursday, June 9th, 2011 at 1:30 am
adnX Imagerie pitches itself as an entry-level photo editor, and the developer says the app wasn't designed to be "a clone of Photoshop or one of its competitors".
This is just as well, because Imagerie's bitmap-editing features are terrible. Bizarrely, such edits are done in a separate 'bitmap editor' window that has a horribly basic toolset, not even including cloning.
Where Imagerie succeeds a little more is in making basic adjustments to a photograph's canvas (cropping, flipping, rotation) and applying effects. Along with the kind of enhancement tools you get in iPhoto (exposure, saturation, and so on), Imagerie bundles a number of powerful filters based around classic camera types and provides access to Mac OS X's many Core Image filters.
There's also a selection of vector tools for applying shapes and text, which are fine, if occasionally fiddly.
The biggest problem this app has, though, is competition: iPhoto's fine for basic edits and most Mac users will have a copy; PhotoStyler (also £18) beats Imagerie for effects; and Acorn (£30) is significantly better for anything related to bitmap editing and working with vectors.
Imagerie's interface is extremely variable – the fullscreen mode is great, as is the app's single-window design, but drawn shapes aren't always selected, the history navigator is awful, and too many controls are fiddly.
As such, the product needs a bunch more work before we'd make a recommendation over one of its contemporaries.
Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Tuesday, June 7th, 2011 at 6:00 am
There have been enough malware scares on the Mac lately. This suggests that the days of not even thinking about checking if your Mac is host to something dubious may be over.
Intego VirusBarrier Plus is a small application (available only from the Mac App Store), which lets you scan your Mac for threats, and, if it finds anything, helps you get rid of them.
It scans your hard drive or selected files for both Mac and Windows malware. This means not only are you protecting yourself, but you're also ensuring you don't unwittingly pass on anything to your PC-using friends.
Scans can be scheduled, so you don't need to remember to run it. What VirusBarrier Plus doesn't do, though, is proactively protect you from downloading or installing anything dodgy – it simply scans your system and reports on what it finds.
It stops short of offering the kind of protection that you'd normally expect from an anti-malware package, but it has the advantage that there's no messy software running on your Mac, potentially impacting performance.
Sophos offers a 'Home Edition' of its antivirus package, which includes the ability to scan files on launch – something that VirusBarrier doesn't include.
But £5.99 is a pretty small price to pay for peace of mind, and if you're only concerned with scanning for Mac-specific threats you can even get the Mac-only VirusBarrier for free from the Mac App Store.
As a solution for checking if your Mac has anything odd installed, Intego VirusBarrier Plus works well.
Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Saturday, May 14th, 2011 at 3:00 am
Twitterrific came off badly in our Twitter client group test just over a year ago. The app was very limited, not even providing access to conversations and searches.
But since then, the iOS version has become our Twitter client of choice on the iPhone, and so we were keen to see how this iOS-like Mac revamp would fare.
The good news is Twitterrific 4 is a big improvement over version 3. Link shortening is available (and, usefully, optional), conversations are accessible (in a great iOS-like pop-up, also used to view profile information and linked images), and searches can be made and saved in the sidebar.
However, Twitterrific still lacks live streaming, user auto-complete and DM threading, and while it’s reasonably keyboard-friendly, the defined shortcuts aren’t nearly as intuitive as those in the native Twitter Mac client.
What’s most surprising about Twitterrific, though, is how variable it is aesthetically. The Iconfactory is known for its fantastic design work, but concepts that work so well on iOS don’t entirely translate to the Mac: the colour scheme differentiates nicely between types of tweets, but text and backgrounds lack contrast, reducing clarity.
And the Mac-only design components don’t always work either – the sidebar has tiny text, and if you hide it you lose access to the search function and must use keyboard shortcuts to switch between feed types.
Again, then, we have a Mac Twitter client that through various shortcomings remains entrenched in the pack rather than forging ahead of its rivals. Shame.
Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Saturday, May 14th, 2011 at 2:00 am
Once upon a time, drive space was a very precious commodity. Now, though, even entry-level Macs come with 500GB or more, and if you buy a decent iMac you'll get the kind of storage that was the realm of supercomputers not so long ago.
So does the average Mac user really need a piece of software designed to help free up additional space? The answer, we think, is 'yes' – and DaisyDisk does it brilliantly.
DaisyDisk visually represents your hard drive as a concentric graph. This makes it really easy to drill down and find big files; once found, you drag them to the button at the bottom of the interface to collect the files, ready to be deleted.
DaisyDisk gives you a running tally of how much space you will save once you hit Delete. Click on a block in the 'daisy' and you can drill down as deep as you want, with a list of the files, folders and their sizes on the level you're looking at over to the right of the window.
On our test Mac, we were able to find about 40GB of Final Cut Express rendering files that we hadn't touched for two years, and deleted them. That's close to 10% of the usable space on the hard drive, saved in seconds; we're willing to bet that virtually every Mac user has something similar waiting to be reclaimed on their drive.
What makes DaisyDisk great to use, though, is how enticing the interface is. It positively encourages you to explore around your drive, and makes this simple part of maintaining your Mac a genuine pleasure.
Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Saturday, May 14th, 2011 at 1:30 am
Scrapbooking is one of the hottest trends in crafting, with its own buzzwords, big name products and even celebrity names.
Nestled somewhere in the space between photography, art and papercraft, scrapbooking involves taking your favourite photos then mounting and decorating them with patterned papers, embellishments and diary-style text.
If you enjoy scrapbooking the traditional way then it's worth exploring the world of digital scrapbooking. And with iScrapbook 3.2, it's a doddle.
One of the first things you'll notice about the package is that it's reassuringly Mac-like. From the 'Getting Started' introductory video to the windows and toolbar, it's clear that iScrapbook's developer wants you to think of it as the sixth iLife app.
The scrapbook elements, grouped together in coordinating kits, are easy to drag and drop where you want them, and the software integrates easily with your iPhoto library to browse and import photographs.
The app comes with all the basics you need to start building your own scrapbook page designs, but the real fun comes when you download the free kits from www.chronosnet.com. There are more than 2,000 downloadable graphics, including patterned papers, alphabets, embellishments, stamps and word art. The kit themes include birthday, Christmas and back to school.
If you've ever baulked at the price of scrapping supplies in HobbyCraft, these digital elements alone make the iScrapbook's price seem reasonable. When you want more, iScrapbook sells additional packs, or you can drag in PNGs, JPEGs and more from your hard disk.
Whether you're brand new to digital scrapbooking or a long-time aficionado, iScrapbook 3.2 supports your level of experience to help you create gorgeous pages. For beginners – or those who just want a quick creative fix – the pre-designed pages allow you to drag and drop your photos into single pages or whole albums in a similar way to building books in iPhoto.
For more creative control, choose from 25 Smart Templates (a new feature for this version of iScrapbook), blank single-page layouts that allow you to mix and match the downloadable elements and photos to suit your style.
Of course, you can take the more arduous route of scrapbooking completely from scratch on a blank page, drawing, colouring and layering your own shapes, and playing with fonts and photo effects – but it's hard to see why you'd bother when the Smart Templates are so much fun to use, and produce such great results.
Once you've finished building your scrapbook pages or albums, you can print them out – though if you've designed your pages on the 12x12- inch format, your home printer is unlikely to be able to print them at 100% – or export them into a format suitable for a commercial printing service. The iScrapbook software will guide you through ordering prints and albums through their website using third-party printing companies, but at the moment this is aimed at users in the USA.
Many digital scrapbookers prefer to keep their creations in the virtual space, and you'll probably find this the most rewarding way to enjoy your iScrapbook creations. Join the community at www.iscrapbook.com and you can show off your pages, browse for inspiration, buy kits and make friends in the forum. Best of all, there's no mess to clear up when you've finished!
Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Friday, May 13th, 2011 at 2:30 am
Orbicule Witness turns your Mac into a motion-detecting home security system. With the alarm set, the application runs in the background and locks your Mac (use your administrator password to disarm).
If it detects movement through your webcam, it records stills and video that can be retrieved through the Witness web page, or using an optional free iOS application.
The iOS app also receives push notifications when the alarm is triggered, and can set or disarm the alarm remotely, as long as your Mac's not in Sleep Mode. An active alarm keeps it from sleeping, but it doesn't stop you reaching it through Back to My Mac.
Any number of Macs can be added to your Witness account, and when you set an alarm, you can exclude Macs.
It only officially supports internal cameras, but third-party cams that work with Photo Booth or FaceTime should be fine. We tried a number of webcams, and they all worked correctly.
Witness is simple to install and use, and reliable in operation. Push notifications are sent quickly, and images and video are stored on Orbicule's servers, so they're still accessible if your Mac's stolen.
There's no option for setting an alarm without locking your Mac, which would be useful for identifying someone who was misusing rather than stealing it, but we're told this feature is coming.
It's Snow Leopard-only, so it can't protect PowerPCs. But if you have an Intel Mac, it's a low cost and useful addition to your home security setup.
Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Friday, May 13th, 2011 at 2:00 am
HDR photography is a tricky technique to master because you're attempting to combine separate exposures of a super-high contrast scene into a single image. You need a tripod or an exceptionally steady hand to get a series of shots that line up in the first place, and then special software to combine them and compress the extra-wide range of brightness levels into a viewable image.
Most HDR apps assume you already know to shoot a series of suitable images in the first place, which isn't particularly helpful if you're just starting out.
HDRtist starts as it means to carry on, though, offering beginner-friendly tips on how to get those images in the first place. Just click 'How to take HDR Photos' on the Welcome screen, and it'll walk you through everything you need to know according to the sort of camera you've got (compact, super-zoom, SLR) or the method you want to use (single image, exposure series, tripod or not).
This is the thing about HDR – you don't always have to shoot a whole series of images. That's only for subjects with a wider brightness range than the camera can capture. If the camera can cope with the scene in front of it without clipping important shadow or highlight detail, you can still create an 'HDR' image because the other part of the process is balancing up the dark and light areas so that they have similar brightness levels.
RAW support
Like other HDR programs, HDRtist can work with both single images and exposure series, and you can use it to exploit the extra latent dynamic range in RAW files; as long as the Mac OS supports the RAW file format, HDRtist can open them.
HDRtist offers two methods, or 'Generators': Exposure Fusion and HDR. Exposure Fusion is often the most effective at producing natural-looking images, and it works by blending the best-exposed parts of each of the images in the series.
The HDR Generator, however, uses the classic HDR technique of combining and processing the brightness values mathematically. It's all really easy to do. Just select the photos you want to combine in the Finder and drag them onto the HDRtist icon.
It creates a new HDR document, imports the photos and displays them in the source bar to the left of the picture, and then blends them automatically. If you don't like what you see, you can choose one of the 15 '1-Click Styles' in the Inspector.
If it's still not right, you can use the Inspector's Adjustments tab to tweak the settings and save a preset.
Your source photos aren't aligned by default, but there is an Align Images button on the toolbar. It can take a minute or so to complete the process, but you'll need to do this if you shot handheld, because the camera will have moved slightly between exposures.
It's a shame there's no zoom function, though, because it means you can't check the image detail for alignment or noise.
HDRtist Pro is simple, cheap and effective, especially when you compare it to the alternatives. For example, Photoshop CS5 has its own HDR tools, but you have to work pretty hard to get good results.
HDR experts might be able to squeeze a little more out of expensive alternatives, but for sheer ease of use, simplicity and value for money, HDRtist is brilliant.
Posted under Apple, Computing, Applications, Software on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 3:00 am
Most text editors have you work in linear fashion, using a single document. If you've related texts, you must manage individual files, possibly across multiple applications.
The Soulmen Ulysses instead has you create projects, which may comprise numerous individual documents, revisions and related notes, all in a single container.
The three-pane interface offers document storage and previews on the left, the primary workspace in the centre, and collapsible notes and document information to the right.
The app is largely intuitive, and well-written help files exist if you get stuck. Under the surface, extra depth includes document management by way of folders and dynamic sets based on filters, which work similarly to Apple's smart containers.
Plentiful export options are also available. However, flaws stop Ulysses reaching the dizzy heights it strives for.
The fullscreen modes are weak. A Lion-like one that removes the menu bar is okay, but doesn't deal with distractions from the app itself; the console-oriented text-only mode is too limited, lacking even a word count. We also disliked the emphasis on code-based semantics (such as using mark-up for emboldening text) and Ulysses only opening a single project at a time.
Scrivener is more feature-rich and does everything Ulysses can, for a little more outlay; and so while Ulysses does enough to warrant a guarded recommendation, Scrivener's better as a project-based writing tool.
