Mac & OS X - The Graphic Mac

Deliver: Automated file delivery with email notifications and more

Mac & OS X
27 Dec, 2010

With the amount of ways you can send a file over the Internet nowadays, it would be nice to have one application for your Mac that can handle most all the popular methods. Deliver attempts to do just that with nearly a dozen delivery methods, and more.

Deliver, from Zevrix Solutions, is a file delivery solution for remote and local destinations with automatic e-mail delivery notifications, compression, lo-res PDF previews and other professional and time-saving features. The delivery notifications are based on powerful variable templates and contain detailed info about the item and its location.

Send files to remote and local destinations with Deliver

Deliver supports the following formats, along with file compression:

FTP
SFTP
AFP
SMB
WebDav
Amazon S3
MobileMe
Local Disk
Email

Deliver offers a few more nice additions, including automated low-res PDF creation for emailing single PDF files, customizable email templates, and a detailed delivery history.

Deliver is available for $19.95, and a demo is available. Zevrix is also offering a beta version of Deliver Express, a Hot Folder version of the full Deliver app.

5 iPhone sites you should bookmark

Mac & OS X
16 Dec, 2010

New and experienced iPhone and iPod Touch users can always use a another site for news, app reviews and commentary, and I’ve gathered a few great ones for you to bookmark.

AppShopper is the best looking and most organized iPhone site

By far, the best site I’ve come across for iPhone apps is AppShopper. When you want to read descriptions, reviews, and price watching, AppShopper is the place to go. It’s also the best looking and most organized site of the bunch. The site also offers a free iPhone app to complete the mobile experience.

The original iPod/iPhone site, iLounge, is still one of the first places people go for news and reviews on all things iPhone. In particular, the quality of their reviews of various iPhone/iPod Touch cases cannot be touched by anyone!

FreshApps is another app review site. The site doesn’t have nearly the amount of content as some others, but the layout is clean and I like the quality of content so far.

iPhone Alley isn’t one of my favorite iPhone sites, but it does contain quite a bit of good content, so it’s worth bookmarking.

148Apps is a great site for iPhone app reviews

148Apps is one of the more popular iPhone sites around, and for good reason. App reviews contain useful ratings, reviews and screenshots. This is one site you’ll want to check out when you’re considering purchasing an app. In particular I like the Price Drops section, where you can quickly see which apps have lowered their price or gone free.

Adobe shipping Acrobat X Pro with new and improved features

General / Mac & OS X
22 Nov, 2010

Adobe Acrobat X Pro, its powerful document collaboration tool for creative professionals who need to take their work to the next level. Acrobat X Pro allows users to deliver polished communications using PDF Portfolios, and work together effectively with shared document reviews. Users can also simplify workflows with integrated online services for storing and sending documents, and ensure designs will print accurately with advanced print production tools.

Adobe has added a host of new features with Acrobat X Pro, including:

The Action Wizard helps users automate and standardize multi-step tasks for maximum productivity.
New customization options for PDF Portfolios enable designers to create and share custom layouts and themes and develop PDF Portfolios with consistent branding and presentation.
Tight integration with online services at Acrobat.com allows users to share large files online and streamline collaboration.
Improvements made to the Preflight tool and printing options enable creative and print professionals to process jobs quickly and accurately.
Acrobat X Pro also supports the latest versions of the PDF/X-4 and X-5 standards, enabling users to stay current with industry standards.
Users can speed up everyday work by customizing the Quick Tools area for fast access to the tools they use the most.

Additionally, Adobe has added two new cloud services – Adobe SendNow and Adobe CreatePDF – that will improve document exchange and enable easy PDF creation.

Customers who previously purchased Acrobat 9, 8 or 7 (either Standard or Pro) and have a serial number can upgrade to Acrobat X Pro for $199.

I don’t have a copy yet, so I can’t say if Acrobat X Pro is worth the price of upgrade, but I do know that Adobe is putting a lot of engineering and R&D into Acrobat, so it most likely continues with the tradition of adding useful features and maintaining backwards compatibility and ease of use. When I get around to upgrading, I’ll post my thoughts on this latest version.

Mac OS X startup key combinations

General / Mac & OS X
19 Nov, 2010

Startup keyboard combinations have been around since the early days of the Mac operating system. Holding down specific keys while pushing the power button offer a plethora of options for troubleshooting when your Mac starts up.

Here are the most useful keyboard startup combinations:

Key/Combo	What it does
⌥ (Option)	Display all bootable volumes (Startup Manager)
⇧ (Shift)	Perform Safe Boot (start up in Safe Mode)
C	Start from a bootable disc (DVD, CD)
D	Start up in Apple Hardware Test (AHT), if the Install DVD 1 is in the computer
T	Start in FireWire target disk mode
N	Start from NetBoot server
X	Force Mac OS X startup (if non-Mac OS X startup volumes are present)
⌘-V	Start in Verbose Mode
⌘-S	Start in Single User Mode
⌘-⌥-P-R	Reset NVRAM
Mouse button	Eject CD/DVD and start up from hard drive

Most of these keyboard combinations will work with any modern Mac, but some models may have variations that work or don’t work.

Iconfactory to release Astronut for iPhone

Mac & OS X
11 Nov, 2010

Normally I wouldn’t post about upcoming software for the iPhone, but this is a special case. Iconfactory, makers of Twitterrific and CandyBar for the Mac, and two wildly popular iPhone games, Frenzic and RampChamp, have announced a new iPhone game arriving just in time for the holidays.

Astronut for iPhone blasts off just in time for the holidays

Not much is known about Astronut, but if Iconfactory’s previous apps are any indication, it’s going to be addictive, and a huge hit!

Convert YouTube and Internet videos to iPod/iTunes format for free

Mac & OS X
20 Oct, 2010

There are plenty of browser plugins that allow you to download videos from websites like YouTube. A few of them even allow you to convert the video to a different format to suit your needs. However most of them are either complex, require further processing, or simply break every time the browser gets updated. Thankfully, there’s a free Mac OS X app that does it quickly and easily.

Evom from TheLittleAppFactory does just that. Evom allows you to convert online video to a number of formats, including iPod, Apple TV and HTML5.

Evom converts Internet videos to a number of convenient formats easily

The easiest way I’ve found is to drag the Favicon of the YouTube page containing the video you wish to convert to the desktop, then to the Evom window. Evom does the rest for you. In my tests, it worked on YouTube and a number of other sites perfectly.

Three great utilities that should be built-in to Mac OS X

Mac & OS X
18 Oct, 2010

With all the cool features found in Mac OS X, it’s hard to believe that there are a few obvious features still haven’t been added to OS X’s Finder. Finder tabs, window management, Dock enhancements, and a more robust dialog box have been shortcomings of Mac OS X for a long time.

Perhaps someday soon Apple will finally get around to enhancing the Finder with the features mentioned above, but until then you can have them now via three fantastic add-ons; Default Folder X, HyperDock, and TotalFinder.
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Create free iPhone ringtones in iTunes 10

Mac & OS X
8 Oct, 2010

The idea of paying for a ringtone for my iPhone is absolutely obscene and ridiculous. That’s why I was so happy to see there’s a quick, free way to do it using nothing but iTunes 10. And it works with any song in your iTunes library.

The process involves setting your chosen song to play only 30-seconds, converting the file to AAC, then renaming it to .mp4r and re-importing it.

Make iPhone ringtones for free using nothing but iTunes 10

The simple process is detailed at OSX Daily in the post titled Make free iPhone ringtones in iTunes 10. I’ve used this simple process to make dozens of ringtones already and it couldn’t be easier (well, actually it COULD be easier, but the record labels and Apple won’t let it be).

HyperDock brings Windows 7 window previews to OS X’s Dock

Mac & OS X
6 Oct, 2010

Windows 7 has a cool feature where you hover your mouse over an icon in the Task Bar and a preview of the windows belonging to that application pop-up in a preview; allowing you to quickly switch to a specific window if you have more than one open in that app. It’s one of the few features found in Windows 7 that I wish was built-in to Mac OS X. Fortunately, there’s a System Preference utility available that brings that feature to OS X.

HyperDock (free while still in beta) gives you that capability and more. Because HyperDock is a Preference pane, no icon for it will clutter your Dock, and uses relatively little system resources to do its job.

HyperDock offers application window previews in Mac OS X's Dock

HyperDock allows for plenty of preview bubble customizations when hovering over Dock icons, including size of previews, a close button, and more. When you hover over one of the Dock previews for a second or so, the window itself appears on screen at full size as well.

Among some of the other cool features of HyperDock is what I consider a killer feature, Window Snapping. With the feature turned on, moving any resizable window to the left, right or bottom edge of the screen automatically resizes the window to fill half the screen and docks it to that side of the screen. Moving a window to the top edge of the screen resizes the window to fill the active area of the screen – leaving room for the Dock to remain in view.

There’s plenty to like in HyperDock, and hopefully it will be priced reasonably when it ventures out of beta.

Font management with Suitcase Fusion 3 now extends to website designs

General / Mac & OS X
28 Sep, 2010

With little exception, fonts can be the number one asset any designer owns, and the most difficult to manage.

The in-house graphic designer with a limited number of corporate fonts to use on a daily basis may need nothing more than Apple’s Font Book app (if even that) to manage a small font collection. But the freelance designer with dozens of clients, the ad agency production studio and the print shop with hundreds of clients must have robust font management or dealing with fonts can become a full-time job. For those users, Extensis offers Suitcase Fusion 3.
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Category: Mac & OS X