Category: Mac

People love photos. We love taking them, editing them, and most of all we love sharing them with our friends and family. From Facebook albums and email attachments to online services like Kodak galleries and Shutterfly, the options seem limitless for how we get our pictures into the hands of our loved ones. But it’s easy to get tired of sending email attachments or signing up for new sharing services.

Posterino from Zykloid software makes the act of photo sharing fun, engaging, and creative again with its easy-to-use interface and plethora of creative options. Read on past the break to find out more and give your old photos new life.

Welcome to Your Pictures, Again

Admittedly, even after reading the product description on the developer’s website, I was still a little unsure what I was going to use Posterino for or how easy it would be to get up and running.

But like any great Mac app, Posterino features a welcome screen with quick links to an awesome screencast that will help you visualize your project and get a great grasp on using Posterino.

There’s a Template For That

Posterino opens with a template chooser that is oh-so-reminiscent of the ones found in Apple’s own iWork suite, split into categories and displayed as large, clear thumbnails.

In fact, using Posterino almost felt like using a long-lost cousin of Pages or iWeb. Anyone who’s spent time using iWork, or even Microsoft Office for Mac, will feel at home in Posterino.

More Time to Play

Posterino makes adding your photos simpler than any program I’ve used on the Mac. The sidebar in Posterino gives you quick access to your photo libraries, whether you’re using iPhoto or Aperture. With no setup, I was able to start browsing my iPhoto events and finding the photos I wanted for my project.

You can also drag any folder from the Finder into Posterino’s browser, and Posterino will keep track of what’s inside so you can access whatever photos you want, wherever they live on your Mac. Spend less time browsing, and more time creating.

Shuffle Things Up

Posterino is rich and robust enough to satisfy power users looking to spend hours perfecting a project. Double-clicking a picture frame on the canvas lets you change the size, shape, and position of the drop zone, giving you infinite possibilities.

However, my impatience tends to trump my creativity, so I was instantly drawn to the Fill At Random button on Posterino’s toolbar. One click and I was fully convinced this was a great app.

Posterino not only filled my project in with photos from my selected iPhoto event, but it seemed to magically know which pictures would fit which drop zones in the canvas. It even seemed to know where the subjects in my photos were, and I found myself only needing to adjust one photo to get a person into better view.

Fix Your Pictures in Four Clicks.

For the pictures that did need fixing up, all Posterino needed was a double-click. Double-clicking an image on your canvas brings up resize handles that any user of Microsoft Office or iWork will recognize. You can quickly change the shape of the image tile and reposition it on your page to your liking.

Even better, if your picture isn’t quite framed or positioned right within the frame, another double-click will give you the ability to resize or reposition the image itself, not unlike adjusting an image mask in Pages or iWeb.

Overall, for being so rich and robust, Posterino will let you accomplish quite a bit in very few steps.

Share Your Creations

Sharing in Posterino is remarkable. All it takes is a quick click on the Export button, and Posterino presents your options:

With the option to do anything from upload to a Flickr stream, export to iPhoto, or even create a desktop wallpaper for your Mac, you can truly take your creation just about anywhere. Of course, you can also take the easy route and simply attach your creation to an email, should the mood strike you.

Overall Impressions

All in all, Posterino was a wonderful surprise. Admittedly, the concept seemed at first narrow, and I couldn’t help wondering what I would really use this app for. But after creating a few posters, postcards, and one beautiful wallpaper for my Mac, I’m convinced. Posterino is a great app for giving your old pictures new life. A few notable highlights were:

• Custom canvas sizes – Don’t just create email attachments! You can specify how large your finished product will be (in pixels or inches,) and export your project as a high-res image, perfect for sending to a print service. For weddings, graduations, or even framed works for the hall, Posterino is a surprisingly powerful publishing platform.
• Wide export options – Creating great projects is one thing, but being able to get them out into the world is often a very different thing. Posterino helps you create stunning projects and gives you the means to get your work into the hands of the people you love.

Posterino is For You

Whether you’re a novice user just looking to make a quick photo project, or a true Mac hobbyist looking to go further than iPhoto projects, Posterino will take your pictures to new places. This app earned a place on my dock, and I can’t wait to start my next Posterino project.

Download the free trial from the Zykloid website and see if Posterino is as much fun for you as it has been for me!

Pro photographers know the drill: plug in digital camera, import to Lightroom/Aperture, spend hours getting that image to look just right, and the results speak for themselves.

However, if you’re an amateur photographer, hobbyist, scrapbooker or just trying to make use of the camera you got for Christmas, you might find yourself less than satisfied with this complex and often time-consuming routine.

With an intuitive interface, powerful features, and speedy performance, Flare promises to give you great looking results without breaking the bank (or your sanity). Let’s take a look and see how it stacks up!

I’m no photographer, so my talented friend Genevieve Brown let me play with some of her photos for this review.

Getting Started

Following a popular (and handy) trend in Mac app development, getting started with Flare is a drag-and-drop affair. Not only can you drag and drop photos in from the Finder, you can also drag and drop from other applicaitons, such as Photoshop, Aperture or iPhoto.

Once your photo is in Flare, you have the option of cropping or rotating in the preview panel, or getting started with editing and effects. There are two directions you can go from here: Presets, or Edit. Flare comes with some twenty six preset effects to apply to your photos, ranging from LOHO to “Plastic camera.”

Whether you set a preset or not, you can fine-tune effects from the edit panel. If you’ve chosen a preset, the Edit panel displays all the effects applied to the photo and lets you add, subtract, or modify them.

At any point you can compare the processed photo you’re working on to the original with a small switch at the bottom of the photo preview.

Effects

There are three types of effects in Flare: Color, Lens, and Creative. Let’s take a look one at a time:

Color Effects

The color effects in Flare are much like those you would find in any photo editing application, with a few more fun ones thrown in:

• Exposure
• Midtone Brightness
• Saturation, Brightness, Contrast
• Tint
• Duotone
• Color filter
• Color gradient
• Black & white
• Crossprocessing

Rather than displaying a histogram like a program like Lightroom or even Photoshop, Flare just shows a simple slider for each effect. If you’re used to manipulating a histogram, this might seem a little over-simplified (though Flare probably isn’t aimed at you…)

One of the things I really like about the editing panel is the control you have over the application of each effect. Not only can you control the intensity of the effect, but also the opacity, blending mode and blending mask.

It basically replicates the Photoshop process of duplicating the base layer, applying an effect, then adjusting the opacity, mode, and mask on each layer, or applying many effect layers.

The Photoshop method, though powerful, can be time-consuming and CPU intensive. In Flare, you can achieve very similar effects from one simple small adjustment panel and see live previews as you work.

On my MacBook Pro, Flare ran pretty fast, with the exception of some of the presets taking a couple seconds to apply, and some larger photos taking longer to load.

Lens Effects

Lens effects in Flare are pretty simple, and include:

• Gaussian blur
• Motion blur
• Zoom blur
• Sharpen
• Glow
• Vignette

These work in the same way as the color effects, and interact with them nicely. Again, these effects are pretty similar to what you can achieve in Photoshop, with simpler interfaces.

Creative Effects

Creative effects are mostly borders and fun, decorative things, as well as basic scale/rotation.

• Grain
• Texture
• Lightleak
• Frame
• Border
• Rounded edges
• Barrel distortion
• Rotation
• Scaling
• Halftone
• Pixelate
• Scanlines

You can achieve all sorts of fun effects here, or be more subtle by adjusting opacity and blending mode. I wasn’t feeling that subtle and just had lots of fun:

Unlike a lot of budget photo editing apps, the borders and graphics in Flare are actually quite nice, and don’t look like the cheap-looking (but fun) effects from PhotoBooth.

Other Features

Snapshots

The Snapshot feature allows you to save effects and adjustments for later reference without having to create a new preset. Then, no matter what other changes you make, you can revert back to the snapshot that you saved previously.

When you save a photo, you have the option of saving the final effects as a snapshot – sort of like keeping the original PSD, but you don’t have to remember where you put it (and it doesn’t eat up your hard drive).

Exporting

Flare can export your finished photo to a email or directly to Flikr, which is a handy feature, but it would be nice if Flare had some sort of batch/roll processing that could apply the same effect to many pictures and upload the whole lot to Flikr/email.

I contacted the Iconfactory folks via Twitter, and they promise that batch editing is on its way in a future update

Save Presets

If you come up with a combination of effects you really love, click “Save as Preset” in the Edit panel, and use your preset in other projects, or share it with other users on the Flare app website.

Conclusion

Flare clearly doesn’t pack the power of more expensive programs like Photoshop or Aperture, and would probably disappoint anyone who takes their post-processing very seriously. However, for the casual photographer, or the budding amateur looking to save a couple (hundred) bucks on processing software, Flare might be a perfect fit.

For the price, Flare boasts a powerful feature set, and allows full control over how each effect is applied, allowing for countless possible combinations.

Flare also features an incredibly user-friendly interface. Anyone can get started right away without having to look at a user guide (though there is an extensive one) or having to spend hours reading online tutorials.

All things considered, I think Flare does exactly what it sets out to do, and does it very well. In conclusion, I’ll leave you with a couple examples of final products I was able to achieve with limited expertise and time!

If you hurry, you can get Flare app for 50% off ($9.99) until March 18 if purchased from the Mac App Store

All images © Copyright 2011 Genevieve Brown

As well as sponsoring the site this week, the lovely developers behind Ensoul have been kind enough to donate ten licenses for our awesome readers.

Ensoul is a great application for creating and preparing beautiful iPhone backgrounds and contact images. It has a stunning interface, a simple workflow, and even handles the process of transferring the images across to your phone (you can read our full review here).

Entering the competition is really easy. All you need to do is leave a comment below, telling us how often you change your iPhone background! Is it every month? Every week? Or every day?

The competition will run for one week, and I’ll pick ten winning comments at random on Thursday, 24th March. Best of luck, and I look forward to hearing what you have to say in the comments!

We all love our phones, and often try to express ourselves through them. While it’s fairly easy to do so via individual backgrounds, creating ringtones isn’t quite that simple. Of course, there’s GarageBand which can be used for this purpose, but isn’t there an easier way?

Indeed there is. Today we will introduce 4 different apps available on the Mac App Store which enable you to quickly and easily create ringtones for your iPhone. Meet Ringtones, Ringer, i Am Ringer and iRingtones!

A Little Background…

While all of those apps are somewhat similar in what they offer, there is one caveat none of them can overcome: they cannot use protected songs. If you’ve been buying from the iTunes Store for a while, you know that now songs are simply “Purchased”, but originally they were a “Protected Purchase”.

Natively, no application can use that music and you’d have to buy a ringtone via iTunes. Of course, you could also simply burn your purchased and protected track on a CD and then re-import it, which would remove the restrictions.

Two words of caution: if you can’t see Ringtones in your iTunes Library, make sure the option is selected in the General preferences.

In order for your Ringtones to be transferred to your iPhone, you also need to check the appropriate box when your iPhone is connected.

Just thought I’d let you know this at the outset, since those are the things which drive most users crazy the first time they try to sync ringtones to their device.

Ringtones

The interface of this application is so straight forward, there aren’t even any preferences for you to tweak. In the left pane you can see all your playlists, as you would in iTunes itself, to the right your songs are shown. The instructions are clear at the bottom.

Once you select a song, details become available in the lower part of the window. The frizzly lines show you the progression of the track. The wider the line is, the louder your music. The more frizzled it is, the more change there is. Naturally, a progression for a quiet piano piece would not be as ragged as something for a rock song.

Think about what you want your ringtone for. A wakeup sound probably shouldn’t cause you a heart attack in the morning, while a ringtone should be fairly energetic and loud doe you to hear it at all. The rest is up to your personal taste.

Ringtones allows for a maximum duration of 38.5 seconds for a ringtone. Just find the area of the song you want to start with, click on the progression in the lower part of the window and drag. The highlighting stops automatically after 38.5 seconds, but you are free to keep it shorter.

If you didn’t hit the right spot, just grab the bright blue area and drag it to either side. This way, you can easily select different parts of your song.

In order to listen to your selection, just hit the space bar on your keyboard or click the preview button.

Depending on your own preferences, you can have the clip fade in and/or fade out. That means that it starts quietly and becomes louder and also gets quieter at the end – it fades out. I myself like that for wake up tones. I don’t want to scare myself in the wee hours of the morning!

A disadvantage is that you can’t force the app to play from a specific position: if you just want to change the ending of your clip, you can’t make it play just the last five seconds, you’ll have to listen to the entire 38.5 seconds (worst case scenario). It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but do that 5 times in a row and you’ll understand what I mean.

Once you got it down to what you want, just hit “Send to iTunes” and within 2-3 seconds, your clip is available in the Ringtones section.

Ringer unfortunately only enters the name of the song and doesn’t include the album or artist information. Those you will have to enter manually if you want them.

From there, just sync to your iPhone and you’re ready to play some seriously awesome and individual music next time someone calls you!

Price: $1.99 | Link to the App Store | Trial Version

Ringer – Ringtone Maker

Ringer takes a somewhat different approach when it comes to the user interface. As you can see, you have multiple choices, though it escapes me what you need Movies or TV Shows for in this particular case. It might be handy if you want to extract some audio for a different purpose, but for ringtones, I guess most of us will stick to music.

If your music library is rather large, you can use the “Filter” option on the bottom left to search for a specific song. I do recommend anyway to pick out the song in iTunes because it’s easier there than in most of these apps (given that you have the artwork and album views to guide you easily).

Once you’ve chosen your song, it will load in the right part of the window. You’ll see the familiar ragged curve again and here it’s also a light blue area that indicates the ringtone selection. It can be up to 39.5 seconds in length.

While you have timestamps that allow you to navigate the song, it would be nice if you could zoom out to display more of the entire song in the window. You can zoom in via a keyboard shortcut, but if you don’t have a rather large monitor, you can’t see much of the entire song at once.

Below the music progression you have controls similar to iRingtones, with additional options to enlighten your Facebook friends or Twitter timeline about your new ringtone.

Be polite and use it with care, not everyone will be delighted about mass postings when you create a dozen new ringtones!

While both Ringer and iRingtones allow you to drag the highlight area while previewing a song (and the replay will start automatically at the the new beginning), only Ringer offers you the option to start playing at a point of your choosing within the selection. Simply double click the spot and the replay will start there.

Once you’re happy, hit create and almost instantly your ringtone will start playing in the iTunes library. Here also only the name of the song will be included in the meta data – no artist or album.

Price: $0.99 | Link to the App Store | Trial Version

iAm Ringer

This app with the self-assured name adds some spice to the mix. The interface reminds me strongly of iTunes, which makes it very easy and comfortable to pick out songs. While that is laudable, I wish the developer would have included the option of making the application window larger. Yep, forget about making the most of that 27″ display.

Once you load your song into iAm Ringer, though, there are some touches that I missed from the previous two apps. Of course, you have your ragged music line again and for some reason the part that can be picked for the song is highlighted in blue as well (did the developers come to an agreement on that?), but the real magic happens in the controls below the song.

You have a dedicated preview button (the arrow with the brackets around it) and then you have the bracket buttons themselves. The left one moves your current selection to the point where your yellow indicator is.

Why is that cool? Imagine listening for your ringtone, waiting for that tenth-of-a-second where it should start. You hit the pause button, punch the left bracket button and you’re there.

The right button though expands or shortens your song, depending on whether or not your indicator is within the blue highlighted selection or outside of it. It’s a very clever and handy way to trim your song.

Additionally, you have the options to define a fade in and out and set the start and stop time of your ringtone manually, if you prefer this. But what iAm Ringer really excels with (and that no other of these apps offer) is a real zoom option!

The slider between the magnifying glasses lets you zoom in or out of your song, enabling you to either quickly jump around or go into very fine detail. That allows you to see the music in-depth and decide even more accurately where to set the markers.

When finished, you just hit the big blue button which will create a ringtone for you (only name, no album or artist), though I wish the button would have a more useful icon.

The circular arrow is somewhat confusing. But don’t let that discourage you. iAm Ringer is a very fine application and is very easy to handle.

Price: $0.99 | Link to the App Store | Trial Version

iRingtones

iRingtones welcomes you with the plainest user interface, asking you simply to drop a music file there. No problem, just fire up iTunes and drag and drop a song right from within it to iRingtones.

While at first the app didn’t look like much, it gives you some very fine grained control. You can define the length of the fade in and fade out (up to 5 seconds each), the time stamps on top of the music progress indicator are incredibly detailed, and in the right upper area you can always see exactly where you are in your song and how long your clip is.

What I missed in the other two applications is included here: for once, you have buttons on the lower left that allow you to preview only the last or first 5 seconds of the ringtone. Very useful if you’ve adjusted the fade in or fade out setting and only want to hear that result.

Also, you can drag the red position indicator to anywhere while previewing your ringtone, so there’s no need anymore to wait to get to a certain spot. Quite a time saver.

While you can drag the selection area – again, blue – to any length you want, a popup will alarm you if you exceed 40 seconds. Quite a nice touch.

The only downside seems to be that while the playback always starts at the beginning when you move the selected area around, the indicator doesn’t always start there immediately – so it’s some kind of graphical quirk, but the functionality of the app is not affected.

iRingtones is also the only app with preferences worth mentioning. You can specify where ringtones will be saved, how iTunes will behave once they are added, and you have a number of keyboard shortcuts that allow you to adjust your clip in a way you won’t be able to with a mouse.

Once you’re done, hit create and with the other apps, the ringtone will be imported into your iTunes library.

Contrary to both other apps, all meta information – title, artist and album – are included. For people who like their music library all neat, a nice feature.

Price: $0.99 | Link to the App Store | Trial Version

Wait, Can’t I Do That All via iTunes Too?

Indeed, there is the option to create ringtones from your purchased – but not protected – songs within iTunes. In order to create a ringtone from your music, select the song and then, via right click, chose “Get Info”. On the options tab, you can set a start and stop time for your song.

Once you’ve done so, right click your song again and chose “Create AAC Version”. The bit you just specified will be turned into an aac version. It’s still a music piece though, not a ringtone.

Once more, right click the new file and choose “Show in Finder”. Change the ending of the file to “.m4r”, which is the file ending for ringtones. Double click it and it will automatically be added to your ringtones library. The original created aac piece can be deleted from your iTunes library afterwards.

Verdict

All four apps perform well. They are all very easy to use and do not require any specific knowledge about cutting or editing music. It’s simple drag and drop, select and then pushing a “create” button. Everyone can do it.

In terms of usability, iRingtones would be my favorite, but since all of the developers offer trial versions of their apps, just download them for yourself and see which one fits you best.

Why not use the iTunes-only method? Well, of course that is the cheapest option. But then, you wouldn’t have the opportunity to easily change the beginning and end of your ringtone by just dragging a selected area. You can’t work visually, you have to manually type in all the information. Also, you can’t specify a fade in or fade out or quickly preview your ringtone.

What is your take on creating ringtones? Do you use a method not mentioned here? Let us know in the comments!

As a student, it’s hard to keep up with all the courses that you are enrolled in and the countless assignments that get thrown your way. Eventually, you forget to get some things done, no matter how responsible you are.

You could use a simple to-do app to keep up with all your due assignments, but why not go further and get a more complete piece of software for keeping your education organised?

Today we are reviewing Schoolhouse, which works as a manager for all your course information, including your grades and your due assignments. Read on to find why we think Schoolhouse could be a great investment for your education.

Before the Beginning

Schoolhouse fits in seamlessly with the Mac experience. Its design is reminiscent of native Mac apps like iTunes – after all, it’s only available on Mac. Recently it has launched on the Mac App Store, where you can pick it up at the discounted price of $4.99.

You could think of it as a GTD app for students, but it’s actually much more than that. Not only can it handle your tasks, it can handle your schedule, your grades, files, websites, and it will keep all of those organized in a neat and stylish manner.

Once you download and launch it, you’ll be presented with a welcome window that will give you some handy tips on what you can do with this app. Then you’ll be presented with a pretty empty window, that you might want to start filling up with all the information from your courses.

Adding Courses

On the bar across the bottom of the app, you’ll see a plus icon that can help you add new courses, notebooks, websites, etc. If you want to add a new course, you’ll be presented with a bunch of options that you might want to fill out.

Some of those include the ability to choose how your course is graded and the schedule of your classes, lectures, labs, or whatever you want to enter.

You can even tell the app when your course will start and end, and make it a repeating task on certain days at certain times. This way the app will be able to make up an accurate schedule for you.

If you go to the “Class Schedule” tab, you’ll be able to see all the classes neatly arranged in your week. And if you label each course by colour (which I highly recommend), you’ll be able to see the coloured classes on the calendar, as well as the tasks under the “Tasks” tab.

Managing Tasks

A “Task” could be a homework assignment, an exam, a due project, or pretty much anything you have to get done. The tasks are very customisable – once you add one, you’ll be able to add all kinds of attributes to them via the sidebar.

These include a due date, the course that they belong to, the priority of the task, and the files that are related to it. Once you get a task done, you can mark it as such and note down the grade that you got on it, so that Schoolhouse can do the math with the info that you gave it on how your course is graded.

All your tasks live in the “Tasks” tab, where you can view them and filter them according to their attributes. Once you get a task done it doesn’t get deleted, it just gets crossed and remains living on your log. Tasks are the main feature of Schoolhouse, as they help you keep everything you have to do organized into courses and dates through the calendar.

It’s a little time consuming to create tasks continuously, but if you have the time for it and are able to keep all your tasks up to date, Schoolhouse could work very well for you.

Notebooks and Other Features

The “Notebooks” are essentially groups of tasks that you can arrange. These could be, for example, “Exams” or “Due Homework”. They have a smart notebooks feature that works through conditions, very much like iTunes’ “Smart playlists”. These Notebooks feature could be useful for quickly accessing tasks that are related beyond belonging to the same course.

As mentioned previously, Schoolhouse can also store relevant website links for your various courses. This works through Schoolhouse’s built-in browser, so you don’t necessarily need to swap between apps.

My school uses a system called “Blackboard”, and I added the relevant Blackboard links to each course. That is quite a timesaver, as you can easily access your courses with just one click, instead of having to navigate through the system.

The Grading System

I was curious to see how the grading system would work in this app without being difficult to keep up with – overall, I’m not completely convinced. First off, you have to input the grading information for each course, under the course’s settings.

Once you get this done you have to go through all of your tasks and tell Schoolhouse the grades you got and where that grade belongs in the weighing system. It’s confusing because there is no support for monthly grades, just for final grades on a course.

I can’t really imagine myself using this feature, on account of it being quite fiddly to set up and keep track of. It might be just what you’re looking for, though, and it’s useful to know that it’s available if you need it.

Conclusion

Schoolhouse is a great app at a excellent price. It does what it claims to do and much more. If you can find the time and will to keep it up-to-date with all your information, it could be a great tool for staying organised as a student.

I don’t think I could necessarily commit to maintaining all my information in an app like this, but maybe you could. What do you think?

I’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to our weekly sponsor, Postbox. This is a wonderful email client for OS X, that goes far above and beyond the functionality of Apple’s own Mail.app.

The latest release of Postbox brings an array of fantastic functionality, some of which we covered a few weeks ago. This includes a unified inbox, account groups, improved conversation views, and “Quick Actions” for replying to messages.

I’ve been a faithful Mail.app user ever since buying my first Mac, and never found a reason to try anything else (I never fell in love with Gmail’s interface). But after trying out Postbox a few months ago, I haven’t looked back. It’s fast, beautiful, and I’m continually impressed by the little features that make it a pleasure to use.

If you’re growing tired with non-existent updates to Mail.app, I can’t recommend Postbox highly enough. It’s the best desktop email client I’ve ever used, and you should absolutely give it a try today.

We make slideshow presentations for all kinds of occasions, and it’s often important for them to look smart and professional – be it to keep an audience interested or to present something to a client. Coupled with the Mac, iPhoto and iMovie both offer slideshow functionality, but both are pretty limited in what they can do.

If you find yourself needing to make slideshows fairly regularly, FotoMagico from Boinx Software may be of interest. FotoMagico is a very intuitive and professional application, perfect for putting together great looking slideshows with photos, video and audio.

I’ll be reviewing the Pro version of FotoMagico, but the standard version is much the same with some features removed. Read on to see what FotoMagico can do for you.

Overview

Upon first opening FotoMagico, I was able to work out how to add photos, transitions, animations, audio, and adjust settings in about 5 minutes without having to read any manuals. This is because FotoMagico has been designed to make sense – nothing seems hidden away and everything happens as you would expect it to.

The interface is split into three main compartments; the Stage for adjusting the position, rotation and zoom of images, the Storyboard for arranging clips, audio and text, and the Sidebar for setting clip attributes, transitions, and for importing media.

FotoMagico works perfectly via drag and drop for importing media for slides and can also access your iPhoto, Aperture or Lightroom library from within its sidebar.

Animations

One of FotoMagico’s strongest features is the ability to quickly and easily animate images, much like the Ken Burns effect. If the ‘Pan & Zoom’ button is toggled on, then the Stage displays two versions of your slide – one at the start position, and one at the end.

FotoMagico then gives you control over position, rotation and zoom of the slide over time which allows you to produce some nice and smooth animations to add a little life into a still photograph. The zoom/rotate controls are well implemented as draggable wheels. These animations can be applied to movie clips and text.

Another great feature is the ability to apply and adjust ease in/ease out. Also worth mentioning are guides which pop up so you know where your final position rests in relation to the start.

Transitions

FotoMagico offers a great range of transitions, all of which maintain excellent image quality throughout. Transitions are edited in the Sidebar simply by clicking the small transition icon between each slide in the Storyboard. From there you can set which transition to use and its duration.

It can be all too easy to become carried away, apply every transition, and create crazy animations, but if you use the tools wisely, the result can look very professional.

Audio

In the Storyboard you can use up to three different audio tracks for music, sound effects and narration. Audio can be dragged from the sidebar, or recorded from within FotoMagico. If you want the slideshow to run for the length of a song, slide duration can be matched to the audio, and vice versa.

Ducking is also available, which means that other audio tracks will be lowed in volume by a specified amount when narration comes on for example.

Exporting

Once you’ve completed your slideshow, there are several ways to present or share it. The easiest way for presentations is to simply play the slideshow from within FotoMagico, which works well with an external display or projector.

There is also a great range of export options to choose from. Slideshows can be exported as a Standalone application, to DVD, for the Web, YouTube, any of Apple’s various devices, or as a Screen Saver. FotoMagico offers useful information on playback and quality of each format.

Conclusion

FotoMagico is a superb application for producing slideshows. Its ease of use is a huge plus and it offers enough great features to create a professional looking presentation, without being overwhelming. FotoMagico offers a 5 day free trial, which is worth giving a go if it looks of interest. I can find very little to fault it on.

I reviewed the Pro version of FotoMagico in this article, but it comes in two separately priced versions. The standard version is priced at $29, and the pro version at $149, which is a significant jump, but worth it if you plan to make good use of it. View the differences between the versions here.

Feel free to share your slideshow experiences with us, along with any thoughts on FotoMagico!

We’ve featured Courier on our website in the past as a Weekly Sponsor, but we wanted to provide a walk-through and review for using this very slick app for uploading videos, pictures and documents to sites across the web.

Courier is now exclusively available from the Mac App Store, and shows itself to be one very well designed and simple to use app.

What is Courier?

Essentially, Courier acts as a one stop shop to upload all of your digital content to the web. It allows for the uploading of videos to YouTube and Vimeo, pictures to Facebook and Flickr, as well as built in support for FTP servers and Amazon’s S3 Storage.

Courier embraces the idea of mailing your documents and media across the web using Envelopes and Stamps. You fill envelopes with files that you you need to upload, and apply the stamps to tell Courier where to send it.

In the most basic sense, it acts as a simple desktop uploading tool. You can use Courier to upload videos to your YouTube account or photos to your Flickr account without having to go to their respective websites. However, Courier also makes uploading one file to multiple sites a breeze.

Advanced Uploading

Courier lets you apply multiple stamps to the same envelope. This way, you can get that skateboarding dog video you filmed last weekend to all your favorite video sharing sites. It will even let you set the metadata for videos and photos, so they are ready for sharing the moment they hit the server.

Along with the several built in locations and online services supported, Realmac has created a repository of add on locations including Box.net and CloudApp. At the moment, there isn’t a huge range of options, but a SDK lets Objective-C developers create their own, shareable, destinations. I’m looking forward to seeing this expand over the coming months.

User Experience

Realmac really paid attention to the user design details. The app resembles a shelf with various envelopes you can scroll though. Adding stamps to folders is a neat process, and it’s fun to have a physical object that connects to the digital process of uploading files.

Another gorgeous part of the application is the Activity View (or Map view). This view lets you see the distance your files are actually traveling while uploading.

For instance, when you upload a video to Youtube, the file progress is shown from your location to San Francisco, California. It’s cute and unnecessary, but a refreshing change to the boring progress bars that fill almost all internet based applications on our Macs.

Extra Features

There are a couple of extra features worth mentioning before we finish. First, Courier lets you ‘skin’ the envelopes that you use each day. There are a few dozen skins you can download from their website.

Second, within the Activity (Map) view, you have a scrollable history of the various videos and files you have recently uploaded. This is handy for reminding yourself of files that have passed through the application in the past.

Wrapping Up

I love the idea behind Courier – a centralized space for uploading files to multiple locations. It would work perfectly to send photos to family via MobileMe, friends via Facebook, and to your site via FTP. The built in delivery tools works super well and the user interface design is something that is both beautiful and useful.

However, a downside is the relatively sparse number of locations that you can upload to at the moment. I hope that Courier’s community helps to grow and expand the number of destinations and skins that you can add to your envelopes in the app.

Courier is now only available through the Mac App Store. When it launched it was $25 (with a $20 introductory price) but is now available only via the App Store at $9.99.

The initial price seemed slightly steep for the features on offer, but for less than the price of a few cups of coffee it will sure save you time and make uploading more fun.

Task management applications are becoming just another part of our electronic lives as we find evermore convoluted ways to deal with our increasingly busy existence. One important aspect of managing all of our tasks is getting that occasional poke when something needs to be done. We do forget sometimes!

Notification features built into GTD apps, though probably essential to most, can become a pain to deal with and are often unreliable. Notificant attempts to alleviate this problem somewhat, while also providing some other handy features that aid in not forgetting important things.

It’s an interesting thought, but do you really need another application to manage reminders? Read on to find out.

What is it?

The name of the software makes this fairly evident, but Notificant is a notification system. That alarm setting you use on your task manager has basically been separated out into a separate application.

There are absolutely arguments against using yet another application to help keep our everyday lives in order, but Notificant does a couple of simple taks very well and it is easy to see why it may be worth it.

Installation

Notificant is available on the App Store so installation is a breeze. As with all App Store downloads the app will be stored in your Applications directory and you’ll see an icon in the Dock.

Notificant will also install as a menu bar item. The Dock icon can be hidden via the system preferences, but you’re stuck with the menu bar icon which really is the best way to use the app anyway.

Get Notified

The main goal of Notificant is to make sure you get notified of a reminder no matter where you are. Task manager or calendar alarm systems are often restricted to a single device, or are not very easy or reliable across devices.

This application will enable you to get notified on any of your Macs and also via email. It is even possible to choose what devices (email is considered a device) get notified for a specific notification.

Creating a notification is very simple. Click on the menu bar icon and pick New Notificaton. The New Notification dialog box above will appear. Type the text for your notice in the text box, adjust the time accordingly and choose the devices you’d like the notice to go to.

There is a 160 character restriction on the notification text. I don’t see this as an issue. If your notification can’t fit into 160 characters it probably belongs in more than one notification.

There is also a url shortener available within the New Notification dialog box. With the character restriction in place, this is a welcome feature. Url in notifications may not be that common, but you could for example, set yourself a notification to read a particular article later in the day. This way you won’t disrupt your current work and also won’t forget about it.

When a notification is executed, the devices you selected for that particular entry will be notified. The main Mac notice is a small box that shows the text of the task. It will remain on the top of all of your open windows until you actually close it.

It’s almost impossible to lose it in the shuffle of your other work. You’re forced to interact with it to get rid of it (probably a good thing).

As mentioned, an email notification can be used as well. There are no surprises here. At the time of notification execution, a basic email with the notice text will be sent to the connected email address. It’s very basic, but it is all that it needs to be.

Web App

Notificant’s core operation is from its web app. In fact, you will need to create a Notificant account to actually use the Mac application. Storing your notifications in the cloud is what will allow multiple machines to be synced.

It is also a way to make sure you don’t lose important notifications in the event something happens to your Mac and gives you a place to see/change/modify your notifications should you ever be away from your primary computer. The notifications are stored in the cloud so they are not at the mercy of any of your hardware.

The web application is beautifully designed. There are many very subtle details that make it really shine. You can tell that time was spent desiging this interface. I doubt you’ll spend a ton of time here, but it is certainly nice to have a web app this well designed to be able to use if need be.

The same functionality exists here as with the Mac app, but there are a few additional features worth noting. First off, this is the place where you will go to view all of your notifications. They will just stack in the order that they are scheduled to execute.

You can see the full text, time and also are able to edit each notification. Notifiction creating and editing within the web app use a lightbox effect as seen below.

The web app also has an Archive section that will show past notifications. Not necessarily essential for everyone, but it is good to know you can look back should the need arise.

Conclusion

Notificant is a very well-polished, simple, inexpensive notification application. As you’ll find with a lot of applications, the simple ones that do one thing really well just stick out. Notifcant is no exception.

Unfortunately, there is no iPhone application to accompany as of right now. This seems like a complete no brainer and I’m guessing we’ll be seeing one at some point. Being able to include mobile devices as options to send notifications just makes sense. This is really the only complaint I have.

Having notifications stored and accessible via the cloud is really the core feature of the application. Multiple machines can be synced and the web application can also be used on machines where the app isn’t installed.

There are a ton of possible great uses for Notificant. It could arguably take over your task management. If all you require is a bit of text and a notice then this is absolutely ideal. Is it worth using as an addition to your full blown task manager? Yeah, I’d say it is.

We have another competition for you all today, with a chance to win one of five licenses for the excellent Smaller.

Smaller is a Graphic User Interface for YUI Compressor on the Mac. It helps you batch minify CSS and JavaScript files with a nice drag and drop interface, and is the perfect tool for web designers and developers that are not big fans of command line. It’s usually priced at a modest $15, but we have five copies to give away today completely free!

Entering is really easy. All you need to do is a post a comment below. The competition will run for one week, and I’ll pick five winning comments at random on Thursday 27th Jan. Best of luck!

Yum from Austrian developers Incredible Bee aspires to be the “cooking companion for your Mac.” To achieve this, Yum offers a combination of recipe management, cloud-based recipe sharing, shopping list creation and a free supporting iPhone app.

There’s quite a choice of recipe management software available for these platforms, so this review will look at how well Yum meets its aims to help you decide if it merits a place in your kitchen.

Getting Started

Yum downloads as an archive file and the first time you run it, it asks if you’d like to move it to your application folder if you haven’t already done so. After checking for any online updates, you’re taken to the Yum starting screen. This is very clear, and gives you the opportunity to watch an overview video which, although it lacks a commentary, provides a good quick view of Yum’s features to speed your learning.

Yum ships without any sample recipes preloaded although you can easily view the ‘cloud recipes’ and, if you’re upgrading from Yum 3, there is an option to import your existing recipe collection.

Working With Your Recipes

At the core of Yum is its ability to help you save and organise your recipes. The recipe entry screen lets you add information such as rating, tags, category, preparation time and yield (number of servings) in addition to the ingredients and preparation details. You can also add a picture of the dish.

All these features make it easier to find individual recipes that match your needs when you have assembled a large collection.

Once you have either entered or downloaded a collection of recipes, they are shown as pictures on a cork board background. As well as scrolling through your collection to spot a recipe that takes your fancy, you can search by any combination of categories, ingredients tags or notes.

You can also set up smart folders that will automatically include every recipe, for example, that uses fish and is rated easy to prepare.

The cork board view looks attractive but if you don’t have a photograph for each recipe, the lack of an alternative text listing means you will probably rely on searching rather than browsing (as reading through the photo captions rapidly becomes tedious).

When you’ve chosen a recipe and you’re preparing a dish, Yum offers a useful full screen mode. This lets you see your current recipe without screen clutter and displays it large enough to read across the kitchen as you work. A floating tool bar lets you zoom in or out.

When working with your recipes, if you find the need to feed a different number of people, provided you entered the yield information in the recipe, the scale button lets you adjust the ingredient quantities for any number of servings.

As each recipe has a button which generates a shopping list, scaling a recipe before creating a shopping list from it makes sure the right quantities are included. Shopping lists are for each individual recipe; there is no easy way to create a list for an entire meal.

Sharing Recipes

One of Yum’s strengths is its support for sharing recipes. As well as being able to print, export or email a recipe from within Yum – each of which creates a PDF of the selected recipe – there is a share button which uploads your recipe to Yum’s recipe cloud for other Yum users to see, comment on and rate.

Discovering recipes from other people is extremely easy. If you choose Cloud Recipes in the interface, the search and browse controls are the same as when you are working in My Recipes

If a shared recipe takes your fancy when you are browsing the recipe cloud, you can download it to your own collection with a single click.

Yum on Your iPhone

Yum users can download a free iPhone app that shows recipe ingredients and preparation details. These are ‘read only’ views so you can browse but not modify or add to your recipes.

In addition to making your recipes portable, the app can build shopping lists from your recipes, thus making it easy to take your shopping lists with you when you buy ingredients or allowing you to decide what to cook while you’re in the grocery store and immediately listing what you need to buy.

The app syncs with Yum on your Mac via WiFi – there is no cloud service or account involved – so your iPhone or iPod and Mac must be connected on the same WiFi network.

Although the instructions in Yum’s help are correct, the on screen guidance in the app incorrectly refers to what was, presumably, a previous method of syncing that has been changed in Yum 4.

Conclusion

Yum is an attractive looking program that is focused on collecting and organising your recipes. The iPhone app is a useful addition to carry your shopping list with you and, if you are keen on sharing recipes, Yum makes it easy.

However, there are so many different cooking web sites for recipe sharing, Yum doesn’t yet have a wide enough range of recipes in its recipe cloud to compete with them (although this could improve over time).

Yum’s exclusive focus on recipe management also puts it at a disadvantage when compared to other, similarly priced, cookery management programs such as SousChef and MacGourmet which offer additional features like menu planning and suggesting recipes based on the ingredients you have available.

Nevertheless, if your primary concern is bringing order to your recipe collection, Yum is worth consideration and you can download and try it free for 14 days to see how well it meets your needs.

Apple is known for often being one of the fore-runners in adopting new technologies – Firewire, ExpressCard, and Mini DisplayPort spring to mind. But equally, the company can be ruthless about dropping the inclusion of features they no longer feel to be relevant.

Blu-ray is an interesting outlier, and it isn’t obvious whether Apple is planning to adopt the technology yet. As themselves a video distributor through the iTunes Store, choosing to include an optical format that’s almost exclusively used for HD films would not necessarily be in their competitive interest.

Apple is a purveyor of the benefits of downloadable content – whether that be apps, music, or HD movies and TV shows. It even seems that they’d ultimately like to move away from optical media altogether, as is the case with the MacBook Air.

Personally, I don’t have a problem with this. I rarely use the DVD drive in the MacBook Pro – a couple of times per year at most – and I wouldn’t think twice before purchasing a machine with no optical drive at all. I don’t own any Blu-ray equipment or media, and am content downloading HD content from the iTunes Store.

But do you feel the same? Or is it Apple’s duty to support a wide range of formats – especially widespread standards such as Blu-ray? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I feel sorry for anyone who likes The Beatles. Partly it’s because the music is a little samey, but mostly it’s because I know what they keep in their attic.

Having bought the back catalogue on iTunes, fans of Ringo & Co. can now open a museum of dead formats to house the vinyl, cassette, and CD editions of the albums they faithfully repurchased, give them all away, or dump the merry lot in their lofts.

If the Mac App Store teaches us one thing, it’s how horrible it must be to be a Beatles fan. Visiting the Store for the first time with a clean Mac, my cursor hovers above the buy button as I consider repurchasing software I already own. Software like Panic’s Coda, which I use every day, and Aperture 3, which I use on days I want to tweak the joy from my photographs.

A Pointless Upgrade?

I’ve bought Adobe software for years, of course, so I know what it’s like to be locked into a hopeless upgrade cycle. Each update brings the same sorry feeling, like watching your wallet trapped in a washing machine. I’ve grown used to that. But I’ve never considered repurchasing identical software.

I waver a few minutes more. Is buying an app you already own silly? Should I wait until the next major update? Somehow, I can’t resist. I do what true fans do: I buy Coda for the second time. The app’s icon jumps to my dock and begins downloading. I feel better already, and it doesn’t take long for me to learn why.

A Brave New Format

I’m not just buying the same software again; I’m buying the same software in a brave new format. The Mac App Store’s been live for less than a month, but I already see my old Mac apps the same way I see my CD collection: as members of a dying format.

With Phil Libin of Evernote predicting that 95% of Mac Apps will be distributed through the App Store in the near future, it’s tough to see the old way as anything but the dead way. Maybe that’s not so bad.

Reaping the Benefits

New formats bring new benefits. Benefits like ease of discovery, lower prices, streamlined purchasing, centralised updates, the death of the serial number, and rapid repeat downloading. Benefits like actively supporting software development, leaving glowing reviews, and proving to developers that their apps mean something to you.

The current downsides — paying for apps again, questions over upgrade paths, exposure to currency fluctuation, forcing free trials onto developer websites, encouraging ‘lite’ versions, and restrictions on what can appear in the Store — are not small trade-offs. Young platforms are never perfect, but I think the Mac App Store is worth celebrating and supporting even today.

Recycle Your Old Software

Which leaves one question: what to do with my old Coda licence? An idea blossoms. What if I could donate it to a friend? An email to the developers at Panic brings great news: they’re happy to transfer unused licences. You just need to send them your friend’s name and email address.

I text an uncle who’s learning HTML. ‘Just made my first purchase in the Mac App Store,’ I write. ‘Fancy my old Coda licence?’ He phones me to say that he’d love it. I hear something in the background. ‘What’s that racket?’ I ask.

‘What racket?’ he says. ‘Oh! You mean the music! It’s “I should have known better,”’ he says. ‘By The Beatles.’

Radio is a technology that has evolved a great deal, and it doesn’t seem to show any sign of disappearing. It’s very convenient to just turn on the radio and get a continuous stream of music for hours, without having to choose anything yourself. It’s very practical, and a brilliant wat to find new music!

However, local radio stations aren’t usually very good. Sometimes you want to listen to a station that plays a certain genre, or a specific talk show that isn’t aired on your local radio stations. That’s where online radio comes in.

There’s an amazing number of online radio stations out there, and plenty of variety to choose from. But of course, you’ll need something to listen to those stations. Today, we present you some of our favorite software picks for radio listening and recording.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are plenty of options out there for listening to the radoi on your Mac. Most of them cost a few dollars, but it’s a small price to pay if you’re a big radio fan. While you may find some good free alternatives, like iTunes, they tend to lack a few features that you might want to use.

If you think you’ll use a radio app a lot and would like to take advantage of features like recording, you might want to go for an app like Radium or Snowtape. Otherwise, you could probably live with iTunes’ radio features.

Would you like to recommend any other software? Are there any that you use that we didn’t include in this roundup? We’d love to hear about them in the comment section below!

Thanks to the hundreds of one-click file sharing websites online, the use of FTP for casually sharing files has drastically reduced. The protocol is all but relegated to just uploading and downloading files to a server. But as simple as file sharing websites are, using them means giving up a lot of control over the data you have uploaded.

If you want to retain this level of security and control, FTP is still the way to go. Now you might say, Mac OS X comes with a built in FTP Server, so why would anyone want to pay for a third party solution? Read on after the break to find out how and why Rumpus is a better solution for creating your own server.

Overview

Rumpus makes it easy for anyone with an Internet connection to run their own FTP and web file transfer server. Clients who have access to your network can effortlessly upload and download files directly to your server, using dedicated FTP clients or a modern web browser.

Yes, Rumpus does indeed have a web interface, which supports all major web browsers on both Mac and PC, and is fully customizable to match your existing website. Rumpus is also capable of ensuring secure connections, with encrypted transfers and full user access controls.

Installation & Set Up

You get 30 days to test drive all the features of Rumpus. The Rumpus installation wizard is a bit different from the ones I have seen in the past. Links to resources that help you get started with the app are displayed in two rows. What makes them notable is that all resources are available for reference locally – even before you install the app!

Unlike some other apps which link to their help and FAQ section of their homepage, you do not have to switch back and forth between the browser. Tiny arrows to turn the pages of the document right from the installation wizard is a nice touch.

The journey towards setting up a FTP server unwinds in three simple steps. In the first step, you will have to select the folder from where the transfers happen. Users will be restricted to this Home Folder and after setting up, you can assign or restrict users to their own dedicated folders.

Creating a secure user account is the second step. This account is the admin account, yet it can still be used by other users to connect to the server (though not recommended). It is also possible to make this account anonymous – meaning no username & password is necessary to connect, however, such an account is just read only. Multiple user accounts with varied levels of access permission can be created later.

Enabling the Web File Manager (WFM) is the final step. WFM enables you to connect and manage the server over the web and might come in handy if you are accessing a machine that does not have Rumpus desktop app installed.

After a splash screen that summarizes the connection settings, we are off to test the app!

Starting the Server

Rumpus impresses you with a neatly designed control panel at first glance. All the icons have a clear description of their functionality to make your life easier. A successful installation does not start the server by itself so once you are ready, hit the Start Server icon on the top right corner to bring the server online.

FTP Settings

To ensure that bandwidth is used efficiently and securely, connection rules can be defined from the FTP Settings screen. Standard sets of rules like timeouts, number of simultaneous connection and the default FTP port can be managed from here. This is the place you will have to come to if you plan to turn the FTP server off.

From the logs tab, comprehensive logs to keep track all connections, errors, transfer details etc. can be created. Custom messages on successful connection and disconnection, along with extensive encoding options, are all available under their respective tabs.

Activity Monitor

The activity monitor lists all users connected to the FTP server including complete details of the file being transferred, the speed at which it transferred, the progress of the file transfer and more. By selecting a user, detailed information including the IP address and bytes transferred can be obtained.

Web FTP

The Web FTP feature is one of the USPs of Rumpus. Web browsers capable of understanding the file transfer protocol and can be used in lieu of a fully blown FTP app. However, they are often a major pain to use and rarely support file uploading.

Rumpus offers a unique solution to this problem through the Web File Manager, which puts an attractive HTML interface on your FTP server. Now you can control the FTP server from the comfort of a web browser and this feature is possible because of the built-in Web server that delivers most of the same features of FTP using a simple, customizable HTTP interface.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to serving files over the Internet from your servers, Rumpus does everything right. Except for controlling the packets being transmitted, Rumpus offers numerous features to keep all aspects of file transmission under control. To be very particular, the ability to control the user rights while connecting and transferring data is thorough and comprehensive.

Rumpus ensures you the much required peace mind that no one can download or upload data that you have not screened yourself. A great feature in this era of digital piracy. For those planning to run FTP servers from their own infrastructure, Rumpus is the ideal choice if they could not find a free, open source app with similar set of features.