Entries tagged with “software” from O'Reilly Digital Media Blog

I reviewed the for-fee Mac apps I wrote about this year and created my Top 5 for-fee Mac apps list. Feel free to add your own list of Top 5 for-fee Mac apps in the comments area.

One member of the "Trio of Album Artwork Utilities for iTunes" that I wrote about three weeks ago was CoverScout. Because there were some minor "misunderstandings" between this software and iTunes 8, I was expecting an update that would fix these issues, and that update came out last Friday. Little did I know, however, that the developers were working on a new major release of the software, as well!

Indev Software's Mail Act-On extension for Apple Mail has been updated to version 2 last week. Among the new features are an improved user interface, support for undo, and applying rules to outgoing email messages.

Two weeks ago, I was still searching for the "perfect" Twitter client for the Macintosh. In the meantime, I've been testing yet another client called Syrinx, and I am so impressed with it that it is now the only remaining Twitter client on my Mac's hard drive.

When browsing your media library by genre in the new Grid View that debuted with the recently released iTunes 8, each genre folder is adorned by gorgeous genre artwork -- as long as you stick to iTunes's default genre names. When using custom genres, or if you're unhappy with the Apple-designed artwork, however, there's a way to add your own custom artwork to iTunes 8.

Little more than four months ago I signed up for Twitter. While I am still not able to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes this webservice so appealing, I have since used it regularly to keep up-to-date with what some of my friends are up to, learn about 'net-related news that lies beyond my own radar, and find the odd gem of wisdom as inspiration. As much as I like Twitter per se, I am still a bit disappointed by the Twitter clients that are available for the Mac.

While editing a podcast in BIAS Peak 6 recently, I was disturbed to hear the audio distorting even though the peak levels were below 100%. Turns out the culprit was a stealthy slider.

Hidden preferences are among the favorite items covered in the Tips & Tricks sections of Mac-related websites, and the method usually presented for setting these preferences is via the defaults Terminal command. Thanks to a utility called Secrets, which compiles an extensive list of hidden preferences for the software installed on your Mac, there is a much more elegant and user-friendly way.

If you're a software developer and you honestly care about the user-friendliness of your software, it is not enough to simply guess which user interface works best for your application: you must _test_ your products with real users. A new usability testing tool for the Macintosh, called "Silverback," now makes user testing available even to those developers who have, so far, found the cost and effort associated with setting up a proper usability test lab forbidding.

Handling email has always been a kind of fight for me: unfortunately, I am highly susceptible to procrastination, so as soon as I spot a fresh mailing list digest or a new issue of my favorite Macintosh e-zine in my inbox amongst all those _important_ emails, it's the latter which immediately disappear from my "conscious field of vision." But I think I have found a remedy: simply move those less important emails out of the way and deal with them later, so I can check the more important stuff without being distracted. This approach turned out to work quite well and, thanks to Mail's rules and Smart Mailboxes, it can be fully automated, too.

Late 1980s, deep in the basement of the Oberlin Conservatory: Strolling past the broken-down harp cases, a surprise visitor enters my electronic music class.

In iTunes and on iPods, "audiobook" is not just another genre, but a distinct type of audio file with a few useful extra features. Creating your own files of this type is possible, and there are numerous tutorials on how to do this. But this is a non-trivial and tedious task -- unless you delegate all the heavy lifting to Audiobook Builder.

With a little help from their friends at SightSpeed, Dell have launched their own video chat service, aptly named: "Dell Video Chat." It's a nice touch that a Macintosh client for this service is available. But is there a compelling reason to use it?

Two weeks ago, I complained about something not being quite right with the way OmniFocus -- a task management application based on GTD -- handles repeating actions, which may cause most of a project's actions to be hidden from you. In the comments to that blog post, a reader suggested three possible workarounds. Here's how useful those workarounds turned out to be, plus an official view on the topic by the OmniFocus developers.

When, three weeks ago, I blogged about Patrick Stein's "SmartSleep" preferences panel, which lets you configure a Mac laptop's sleep and hibernation (aka "Safe Sleep") settings, I explained that I wanted to use this software to switch off Safe Sleep altogether, because that feature had failed on my MacBook so many times that it was basically useless. I didn't expect SmartSleep to restore Safe Sleep's usefulness, but it did.

The bottom line I gave to my review of ScreenFlow, Vara Software's screencasting studio software, last month was that " ScreenFlow does deliver on the promise of providing a one-stop-shop tool for creating high-quality screencasts with excellent visual effects, and it does so in a polished, modern, and totally Mac-like user interface." Apparently, ScreenFlow also appealed to this year's Apple Design Awards jury.

One of the fundamental concepts used in OmniFocus is that of "Next Action." Each project has a Next Action, and it is the very next task you have to get done in order to keep that project moving. Being able to focus on such Next Actions is tremendously helpful for managing a large number of projects without losing track of what literally needs to be done next. Due to a curious problem with the way OmniFocus determines what a project's Next Action should be, however, you may overlook some tasks without even noticing that they are being hidden from your view.

Sometimes, new phenomena show up in Internetland that, at first sight, make you wonder about who would really need this. But keep an eye on them for a while, and you may notice a few things about them that make it well worthwhile to try them out yourself, after all. Twitter is one such phenomenon, and now that I'm finally ready to give it a try, I could use some help.

Evernote blurs the line between client-side software and web service. It makes mulit-media note taking simple and lets you access your notes anywhere and anytime. You are no longer tied to a specific Mac with a single-user license. It frees you and your data to be productive no matter where you are and what you are using (including a phone).

Overwhelmed with URLs that friends, family, and co-workers had sent me to, I was shocked to find that my "to be visited" folder had over 150 items, some nearly two years old. So, I called Hazel.