Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

StackSocial has just launched a Mac Photo Effects Bundle, and I’m pleased to announce that we have 3 bundles to give away to our readers!

The bundle includes FX Photo Studio Pro, Colour Splash Studio, and InstaDesk – the first 500 people to buy also get four extra licenses of the first two to share with their friends and family. It’s a great chance to get your hands on some quality, and versatile, photo editing apps!

You can take a look at the details of the bundle over on StackSocial, and then enter by following the instructions below…

How to Enter

Entering the competition is really easy. All you need to do is:

1. Post a link to this competition on Twitter mentioning @macappstorm and @stacksocial.
2. Leave a comment, letting me know your Twitter username!

Best of luck, and I’ll be picking the winners in just over a week.

If you’d like to buy the bundle then just enter ‘appstorm10′ in the promo code box when you check out and the first 100 buyers get 10% off! Anyone who buys the bundle now but then wins the competition will be reimbursed.

There is no doubt that the iPhone made push notifications cool and took that idea mainstream for Apple fans. But like most things Apple, at first push notifications weren’t open to all third party apps at launch. When users were clamoring for a way to get notified of things as and when they happen, Boxcar jumped in and filled the void effectively.

Boxcar was an elegant solution and alerted users with instant push notifications for all your social networks, email accounts, RSS feeds and more. As Apple opened up push notifications to third party developers, the influence of Boxcar dropped down a bit, but with 1.2 billion messages delivered to date, it’s an app with no match.

To make the lives of information junkies everywhere easy, Boxcar has released a beta version for Mac making it a breeze to receive super fast notifications when someone comments, updates or messages you. Join me after the break to check out if the app is as good as its iOS counterpart.

Overview

As I mentioned earlier, Boxcar notifies you of any updates from the services you have subscribed to. Like all the other versions of the app, the Mac version is available for free.

In addition to top free services like Twitter and Facebook, the app supports notifications from popular paid services. 27 different services are available for you to choose from. To add and keep track of all of them will require you to sign up for a Boxcar account.

Installation and Setting Up

You will have to download the app at present from their homepage and once they are out of the beta phase of development, the app will be available on the Mac App Store. After a simple drag and drop installation, the Settings screen of the app is displayed. To start using the app, a Boxcar account is essential and there are options to sign in or sign up in the same screen.

Clicking the sign up now button opens up in a new browser window, but it would be great to have the form built right into the app. Except for the hassle of moving your attention to a browser window, the sign up was painless and didn’t even require email validation. After signing up I noticed that a major chunk of app management can be done only via the web interface.

Adding Services

The Add Services button can be found in two different places in the desktop version of the app and neither of them function as they should be. Just like in the case of the sign up, whenever you hit Add Services, the web app will open up in a new window. But since there aren’t many hoops to jump to get a service added to your account, except for this process of back and forth, we can overlook this inconvenience.

Managing the Desktop App

So, when you are all done, wait for a few minutes (or less, depending on how frequent the services you have subscribed to are) for the notifications to come in. Assigning custom sound effects to each service you are tracking is a brilliant feature and means you don’t have to pay attention every time an insignificant notification shows up.

Speaking of sounds, Boxcar offers you two unique options to quiet the app when you don’t want to be interrupted. First, you can use the Mute button to temporarily silence the app for a short duration. Otherwise, you can turn them off altogether from the Preferences screen without having to visit the web app.

Notifications are properly labeled, timestamped and displayed in a chronological order. The badger number helps you stay on top of all the unread notifications since your last visit.  If you plan to read the links, they will all be opened in new browser windows. Sadly, you can only read the notifications. Options to at least retweet or share the notifications will help make the app multifunctional to an extent.

Final Thoughts

I wasn’t thrilled to sign up from a web browser, configure subscriptions and then use the desktop app just for the sake of getting notifications. But it keeps the app free of bloat and makes a huge difference if you are using the mobile version of the app. A major downside I noted was after adding all the services, it took a long time for the notifications to start showing up.

It was weird because all the services I subscribed to earlier have added a bunch updates since then. But once the notifications finally started showing up, they came in regularly. And there were those occasional crashes too. Boxcar for Mac is a welcome new addition to the toolkit of information junkies. You should go for it if you are one!

If you are a professional or at least enthusiastic user of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you will have worked with brushes. And the beauty of brushes is that there are millions of them out there and that they can be loaded into PS fairly easily.

But how often has it happened to you that you’ve downloaded some brushes and then later forgot what they looked like? Or maybe you have a huge collection already in PS, but finding the right one requires clicking on every one of the sets. That’s where Brush Pilot comes in – it previews your brushes and saves you oodles of time. We’ll take a look at the helper app after the break.

Preview Any Local Brushes

Whether your brushes are installed in Photoshop or you’ve just downloaded them to a folder of your choice, Brush Pilot finds them immediately. You don’t even have to restart the application, everything happens live.

As you can see, Brush Pilot automatically detected my regular Presets folder that holds all brushes already installed into Photoshop. In addition to that, it shows brushes I downloaded from the web into my Downloads folder.

Simply clicking on a brush brings up the preview in the right pane. And that happens fast. Fast as in immediate! There is no delay or slow build-up of the previews, you can really just go through a large number of sets really quickly in search of something.

The control on the bottom right allows you to scale the previews. That’s especially handy when you want to look at details of high resolution brushes. In the small preview mode, you can look at the entire set; in the large preview mode you can see everything of just one brush.

Manage Brushes Easily

Brush Pilot is more than just a pretty face. Apart from giving you instant previews, you can also install brushes right from within the app and have them available in Photoshop.

All that’s needed is one click on the Install icon on the upper left and it’s done. The brush will be copied to your presets folder, but not removed from the original location.

In case you try to install the same brush twice (which can happen, since there is no feedback for a successful installation), Brush Pilot will warn you that the brush is already there.

Use Brushes Everywhere – Export PNGs

So, what if you have this one awesome brush, but you want to use it as an image, maybe in your Pages document? Brush Pilot does’t fail you. Via the PNG-export button you can export any brush to a PNG file and even set a transparent background.

If your brush set contains more than just one brush, all of them will be exported as separate files. Extremely convenient and much faster than doing it yourself via Photoshop.

Verdict

Granted, Brush Pilot is a niche-product, but those of use working regularly with Photoshop and making use of brushes can optimize their workflow with this little helper app.

The features mentioned above are just the core functions; there are many more aspects like file-path-view, deleting brushes or printing brush overviews which can come in handy.

So, for all heavy brush users out there: take a look at Brush Pilot. The trial version is limited to show only 5 brushes per set, but you can see for yourself how fast it is and how useful. But be careful: once you’re hooked, there’s no going back.