Fresh Apple: The Apple Blog (8 сообщений)

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The Apple Blog
The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
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Flickery - The "iPhoto" For Flickr
Eternal Storms has released a public beta of flickery, an OS X (Leopard only) client for flickr. It bring a great deal of iPhoto-like functionality to your flickr.com account in the way it displays photos and enables you to tag & group your collection. You can also browse, view and comment on pictures of your friends or upload and manage your own photos and favorites, all from a clean and simple interface. You can also perform minimal editing functions pre-upload along with the option to e-mail your images via Apple Mail and even download them.

The view options are pretty nice: you can switch from a mini-overview (pictured below) mode to full-window mode to full-screen view (with slide-show controls).

Main flickery App Window

Full Window Mode

Flickr Metadata Info Editor

Flickr Search

Download Progress

The full download is a (again, Leopard-only) Universal Binary and expires on June 30, 2008. Remember, it’s beta software, and while it worked fine for me, your mileage may vary. Overall, it is a great addition to the various flickr apps for the Mac. While iPhoto & FlickrExport will still be my primary means of getting images into flickr, I can definitely see myself using flickery as a way to organize my flickr library and search for images of interest.

If you give flickery a try, drop a note in the comments!

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Engadget Awards

Every year Engadget gives Readers’ Choice awards and Editors’ Choice awards for different gadget related items. Guess which company won the most awards? You’re right, Apple.

Here is the shortlist of Apple’s accolades:

iPhone won Best Gadget, Best Smartphone, and Most Anticipated Gadget (3G) for the editors and the readers.
The iMac won Best Desktop for both readers and editors
MacBook Pro won Laptop of the Year for readers while the Dell XPS M1330 won out for the editors.
iPod Touch won for Portable Media Device of the Year for both editors and readers.
The Apple thin keyboard won Peripheral of the Year for readers.

Readers voted Microsoft Vista as the Worst Gadget of the Year and the editors chose the Palm Foleo in the same category.

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Scrivener - A Writer's Paradise
I first heard about Scrivener on MacBreak Weekly a couple days ago, and although it has been around for a while, this was the first time that I heard about it. It was only mentioned as "I only use Scrivener now" when they were talking about iWork and Word 2008. I thought I would give it a try.

Scrivener is billed as the only word processor that will help you do everything from the very first idea you have to the final draft. I find it easier to think of it as word processing on steroids. But it isn't really a word processor, and Keith, the developer is the first to point out often that you will need a different word processor if you want to have a final printable draft of your work. You can do so much more (and so much easier) with Scrivener than Pages or Word. You can be pretty confident that the product is good when the developer links to alternate programs on his website. That shows that the intent is to provide a good user experience, and not only to sell a product. A little of that goes a long way.

Drawbacks

Let's get the negatives out of the way so we can end on a more positive note.

There are no page layout views. Granted, there aren’t supposed to be any, but, it is still a drawback when you don’t have that and need to export it to Word to get it to layout correctly.

The first thing you will notice is that it is very different from most text editors because there is a lot more to do, which means a larger learning curve, though there is a great detailed (and long) tutorial, that will help get you on your feet.

When you are in full-screen mode, you can't switch between documents. You must exit full-screen mode, choose another document, then open full-screen mode again.
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Bee Docs' Adds New Dimension To Creating Timelines
Somehow, I missed this despite subscribing to Adam’s blog, but Bee Docs’ released Timeline 3D this month.

The main new feature is the ability to display/present timelines in (no surprise) 3D mode. The best way to see what this looks like is by viewing the demo video Adam has put together.

While I’ve touted Bee Docs’ Timeline in the past, Timeline 3D really makes it very easy to “wow” folks during a presentation and also makes it very straightforward to really focus the attention of your audience on each timeline event (always a good thing). I will warn you, tho, that rendering timelines with a large number of elements and graphics will take some time (this is an area that I have to say needs some work).

Another great thing about indie developers (like Adam Behringer) is how they interact with their userbase. Adam chronicled the development of Timeline 3D on his blog and even hired one of his customers (Gary C Martin) to help with the 3D design.

$25 USD buys you an upgrade to the product from the crufty ol’ 2D Timeline “standard edition”, and $65 USD gets you a shiny new copy for those who do not currently use Bee Docs’ Timeline.

If you’ve used the new 3D product or give it a try, let us know your thoughts & experiences in the comments.

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Software Updates & New Release Highlights For Week Ending 05-17
Apologies to all as I’m a bit late with what I was hoping to be a regular Sunday post. Again, here are my pics for the best program updates and new releases from the past week (and, remember, these are programs I either use regularly, tried due to interesting features or have been convinced to evaluate):
- TrailRunner - 1.6v228 - A recently released-as-freeware program to track runs/hikes. If you have a GPS and do any type of walking, running or hiking, TrailRunner is an awesome program to keep you motivated. (I really need to do a general review of Mac fitness programs) Version 1.6v228 is pretty much just bug fixes.
- Office 2008 SP1 + 2004 Security Patch - Office gets and update (and fills us with hope and promises for a better, VBA-filled future)
- Flash Player 10 Beta - Adobe kicks Flash up a notch (on all platforms)
- NewsFire - 1.5 (v73) - Prior to NNW, NewsFire was my news reader of choice (even when it was commercial). I still think it’s prettier and more Mac-like than NNW (in some ways) and keep up with the updates to see if it’s something I should go back to. This version is pretty much bug fixes.
- Skype - 2.7.0.330 - Having moved away a continent’s width away from most everyone we know, Skype is one of the best cross-platform tools for keeping in touch for us. This update improves NAT-PMP & uPnP support as well as support for authenticated proxies. There are also (as is the case with all Skype updates) a plethora of bug fixes.
- VisualHub - 1.33a - VisualHub (iSquint’s big brother) makes my bus commute far more tolerable and Techspansion has fixed a few bugs
- MacSword - 1.3.5 - A great, free, multi-translation Bible tool for OS X (and other operating systems). This version fixes a problem with CSS style loading that broke after the 3.1.1 Safari/WebKit update.
- Bee Docs Timeline - Standard Edition - 2.1 - One of the best timeline makers for OS X fixes some minor bugs. Watch for an upcoming Timeline 3D review.
- BurnAgain FS - 1.0 - Re-packaged and feature updates version of BurnAgain DVD that adds native OS filesystem burning support for mutli-sesion media.
- Evernote 1.1 - Your personal memory manager adds support for PDF files, including a “Save PDF to Evernote” print/PDF dialog option (it even indexes the PDFs!), full Spotlight integration, new view panes & modes + the ability to encrypt portions of notes (don’t forget to check out our review of the initial release). Sounds like a new review is order as well!
- Acorn 1.2 - I missed this in the last update and really felt the need to include it since there are a slew of impressive updates. New filters, layer options (and a nifty drag & drop way to create layers), JPEG 2000 support and more. Photoshop: watch out.
Tell us your picks for the best updates/releases (or keep me honest by pointing out something I’ve missed) this previous week by dropping a note in the comments.

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Interview with Sara Robertson - Warner Bros. Records

Today I’m talking to a longtime friend of mine and my favorite hipster tech girl, Sara Robertson. I asked Sara to share some of her day-to-day Mac experiences at Warner Bros. Records, the workflow for her personal projects and in the greater entertainment industry.

Travis Vocino for The Apple Blog: Hello there Sara. We’ve been friends forever. So naturally, I know what you do because we probably have a constant iChat window open at all times. For the other people, though, can you tell us a bit about what you do over at WBR? What kind of environment is it as far as the pace of technology?

Sara Robertson for Warner Bros. Records: I’m currently managing the web production of our artist sites, most of which are on the Drupal platform. We have around 90 active sites, and probably 20 more currently in active development. It’s an extremely fast paced world, with fluid and flexible technology being the cornerstone of our ability to get anything done. Ours is the only major record label with a dedicated tech department, and our whole department runs Apple technology. In addition to WBR, I work full time on my pet project Melodramatic.com, and participate in any number of contract and freelance Internet projects.

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Apple Sold 66% of Computers over $1000

NPD is reporting that although Apple only has 14% share of the overall computer market, when it comes to computers over $1000, Apple is king, selling 66% of the total computers sold. It certainly helps that the only computer you can get for less than ten Benjamins is the Mac Mini. But if you upgrade the Mini or buy a monitor, you are up over $1000 pretty fast.

Doing a little bit of fuzzy math, it seems that only around 12% of people even buy a computer that expensive. The price point could be Apple’s biggest competitor. When people are looking for a computer to surf the web, send email, and maybe do some word processing, spending $500 is probably a lot more enticing than double that amount. A Mac around the price of a 16GB iPhone might help Apple’s overall market share really grow.

These numbers are all for brick and mortar stores. It does not include online purchases.

[via eWeek]

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Forum Activity: May 19, 2008
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