Reviews - page 158

What it is: A PDF manager—think iPhoto for PDF, but with superior tagging, and no weakness for mucking about with file locations.

Why it’s good: Along with being absurdly fast (our copy was ready to rock on a Mac with several thousand PDFs after about two seconds), Yep automatically creates tag keywords based on document locations, and, unlike iLife apps, doesn’t copy documents into its own database—it just leaves them wherever you’ve stored them. User-defined tags and smart collections enable you to rapidly create virtual dynamic groups of PDFs based on your own criteria, and since metadata is written to each file, searches can be performed in Spotlight. The ‘Tracking Locations’ sidebar enables you to navigate in a Finder-like way, but filters the main view to display previews of PDFs in the current folder and nested ones. Also, the succinct manual’s dead good and should get you going if you find the interface a wee bit bewildering to start with.

Where to get it: Yep is available from Ironic Software, costs $34, and requires Mac OS X 10.4.10 or later.

What they are: Utilities for iPhone. Weightbot is a weight tracker that enables you to input your weight (in US, UK or SI units), whereupon it reveals your BMI and also tracks your weight over time, automatically graphing it. Convertbot is a conversion tool for things like speed, currency and length.

Why they’re good: Neither of these apps is unique in its field, but what Tapbots have done is create utilities that make the mundane a little bit fun. Suitably mechanical sound effects pepper the apps as tasks are done, and the interfaces are beautiful and tactile. Also, in taking a unique path regarding UI, these apps are more usable than most. Weightbot is a shining example of an interface suited to iPhone—it’s perfectly intuitive, making fine use of the touchscreen and accelerometer (for example, turn your iPhone sideways to see graphs). Both apps are also stable and affordable.

Where to get them: Both apps are available from the App Store (Weightbot, Convertbot). At the time of writing, Weightbot is priced at $1.99 and Convertbot is $0.99.

What it is: A menu extra that provides at-a-glance statistics relating to CPU usage, memory, drives, your network, drive temperatures, fans, Bluetooth and date & time. Stats are shown in the menu bar, and each item’s menu provides further information.

Why it’s good: It’s fast and it’s stable, plus, unlike many similar applications on the Mac, it’s free. Set-up is absurdly simple, done via a System Preferences pane (although, iStat menu guys, being able to open configs directly from each menu would be a nice idea). The crowning glory is the Date & Time module. It enables you to show the time and date simultaneously in the menu bar, and the item’s menu provides a simple calendar and optional world clock. All three of these things are available as individual shareware via other companies, but here they’re all integrated, well implemented and free.

Where to get it: iStat menus is available from the iSlayer website, and even if you only use the Date & Time module it’s worth a look. Note that if you use the app very regularly, a small donation will help iSlayer work on future verisons.

What it is: A simplified air-traffic control game. You drag paths for aircraft to direct them to designated landing zones. The number of aircraft on-screen rapidly increases, making it harder to avoid a collision. One collision and the game ends.

Why it’s good: It’s an original concept, perfectly suited to the iPhone touchscreen, and utterly compelling. At first, it seems like the game will be a breeze, but the difficulty curve is steep, and after only 20 or so landings, you’ll find the screen full of aircraft to deal with. The game also has a great sense of humor in its presentation (including twee aircraft ‘muzak’), and, for those moments where it all gets a bit much, a handy pause button. Like Tetris, it’s a simple game that you’ll return to regularly.

Where to get it: Flight Control’s available on the App Store, and is at the time of writing on sale for $0.99. More information about the game can be found on the Flight Control website.

Phonesuit’s MiLi Power Pack will free you — in style — from the tyranny of needing to recharge your iPhone every night, or after say, every five hours of serious use.

The casual iPhone user probably doesn’t need a MiLi Power Pack, which, at $80 is a not-insignificant investment in extra power, especially if one tends to be in the habit of recharging the device overnight on a daily basis.

However, power users, who have adopted the iPhone as their primary telephone, or who spend a lot of time using it to surf the web, pull up Google maps, send lots of email, are into serious gaming, use it as a constant music player, or take and edit lots of photographs — those users will love having a MiLi Power Pack on hand.

Read on to find out why.

To my eternal shame, my job requires that I use Windows at work. Lately, that’s been extremely interesting, because I just got a new machine at the office, and it’s spec’d similarly to my beloved 2.4 Ghz Unibody MacBook. That means that I actually get a pretty clear sense of the relative performance of Windows XP v. Mac OS X (what, you expected Vista). Honestly, for most tasks it’s a wash. I don’t do a lot of heavy graphics work on either platform, and web browsing is kind of web browsing. I typically use Chrome (fastest Windows browser) at work and Camino (fastest Mac browser at home).

Today was really interesting, however, because I tried out Safari 4 for Windows before I got to it for Mac. And I was extremely disappointed. It ran no faster than Chrome (maybe a bit slower), and it misrendered at least 50 percent of the sites that I visited — it couldn’t find thumbnail pictures, and it was flat-out ignoring CSS sheets on several sites. Within about an hour of starting use, I uninstalled it and moved back to Chrome. The beta is just about as beta as anything bearing the name I have ever seen. Running the Acid 3 test crashed the browser.

Installing Safari 4 to Mac, however, was as far removed from it as I can imagine. Animations were smooth out of the thumbnail Top Sites page. The browser aced the Acid 3 test on the first try — and each successive one. Twitter loaded like it was an app on my hard drive. A heavily Javascript driven message board I visit popped up faster than anything I’ve seen it since I was on text-based USENET in the mid-90s. It lived up to the hype, and it actually provided a worthy contender to Camino as the best browser on the platform (although I ain’t switching anytime soon; ).

I’m left at a bit of a loss from all of this. On the one hand, I’m delighted to have a blazing-fast new web browser for my Mac. On the other hand, I can’t believe Apple would ship such terrible software for Windows. How are you going to convert anyone when your product is inferior to the status quo?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp2s7nydo6w

Look, it’s Rogue for iPhone, otherwise known as Rogue Touch.

Those of you of a certain age will have fond memories of Rogue, which became very popular in the early 80s. Its co-creator Glenn Wichman has written an entertaining history (sadly, his link to Rogue-related stories he’s been sent is broken) and of course, these days you can play it in a browser window.

Chronosoft’s colorful update is a world away from Rogue’s ASCII origins, and the gameplay is very different because the keyboard controls have been replaced with (somewhat hard to fathom) swipes, touches and gestures. So if you want something more authentic (and you’d rather not pay for your dungeon-exploring), you should try Gandreas Software’s version of the original, which is much more “Roguelike”. It includes a plain ASCII mode and a graphics mode, and lets you enter commands with letter-shaped finger gestures. It’s still very different, but it’s as close to the original as a keyboard-less device is going to get.

And if you still want to play the original game on your computer, you can download it from Sourceforge. See you in the dungeons.

Here’s my latest addicton, taking over where Trism left off. It’s Drop7, and it’s just wonderful.

The rules are very simple: drop the numbered discs into the grid. If the number on the disc matches the number of discs in that column or row, that disc will vanish and you’ll earn points. Hidden discs are revealed by making their neighbours vanish. It sounds simplistic but it soon gets fiendishly challengng, especially as extra rows of hidden discs appear whenever you move up a level.

But the main thing I’ve noticed about Drop7 is the way other people react to it.

Ooooh, now this is interesting. Flux solves a problem that I didn’t even realize I had.

It automatically adjusts your computer’s monitor brightness according to the time of day and likely lighting conditions. Most screens look fine during the morning hours, because they’re made to be BRIGHT like the day outside. But when you come back to them after dark, or even just as evening’s falling, they sear your eyes and you reach for the brightness controls.

Flux automates that. Tell it your location and the kind of lighting you normally work under, and it will do the rest. I like the way you set it up and forget about it after that – it will take care of everything without you having to think about it. My kind of software.

Ancient Frog is a new kind of puzzle game for the iPhone. The premise is very simple: you have to guide your frog so that he’s in position to eat a tasty fly. But there are only so many places on the lily pad where he can tread, and his legs will only move in certain ways.

Yes, it’s bizarre, but it’s different and it’s challenging after the first few easy levels. Each fly catch is given a par score, just like golf, and you have to think very hard to get your fly caught under par.

This game isn’t just unusual to play, it’s also gorgeous to look at. Like all the best software, Ancient Frog benefits from attention to detail – I particularly like the way the frog’s little toes animate after you’ve moved his foot. Recommended.

I’m one of those freaks who much prefers listening to radio than watching TV. Consequently, I like to have radios around me. I have one in my office, one in the kitchen, and one in the bedroom. I really need to get hold of one for the bathroom.

FStream and the BBC Streams web site have jointly come to my aid.

Ecamm’s Call Recorder plug-in for Skype is an easy-to-install, easy-to-use solution for enabling voice and video call recording in Skype, well worth the $15 cost – a highly recommended plug-in for anyone with a Mac who wants to keep records of their Skype voice and video calling history.

I ran into a situation over the weekend where I had scheduled what I knew would be a long interview, something I wanted to be able to refer to later this week when I’m writing up a profile of my subject for a project I’m working on.

The thought of once again trying to cobble something together using a cassette recorder with my iPhone on speaker had finally become too much to bear: how many times in the past had a conversation been too garbled to interpret, or had I forgot to press the record button until several minutes into the conversation? Once I even did an entire interview having forgotten to put batteries in the cassette recorder, and had to face the ignominy of asking my interview subject to let me re-conduct our whole conversation the next day.

Of course, the simplest thing might be for Apple to enable (or at least approve) a comprehensive recording mechanism for iPhone calls, but since that’s not the case at present – and may or may not be grist for another post – I decided to use Skype for our call once I found Call Recorder and installed it.

Ecamm’s Call Recorder has been around for a while, but gets it right with this lightweight (2.3 MB) plug-in that installs in minutes and runs automatically within Skype – with the advantage of being highly configurable and supporting fully manual operation as well. The current version 2.3.4 also handles recording and archiving of video calls, though I’ve not yet personally done one of those.

Both sides of a voice call are recorded to separate tracks in a QuickTime movie, which can be easily converted to MP3 format and then emailed or posted to a website. Call Recorder can handle completely uncompressed recording for highest fidelity, or compress recordings at a 2:1 ratio or using AAC encoding. Video encoding can be done as JPEG, MPEG-4 or H.264.

For any journalist, podcaster, online instructor, even for business people looking to ensure accountability and corporate audit trails, Call Recorder adds easy, indispensable value to Skype on the Mac.

PhotoCanvas, a new image editing app from Big Canvas, Inc. could make Apple’s eventual decision to enable MMS functionality on the iPhone and iPod Touch a moot point.

While many have decried the iPhone’s inability to easily send photos and graphic images in text messaging, a relative few in the US may be aware of Big Canvas’ flagship application, PhotoShare, the free service that allows users to stay connected with their private or public networks through visual social networking.

With a few simple touches users can easily take images captured through daily life and distribute them to all PhotoShare users or to family and friends. After its release in July 2008, PhotoShare quickly became a “must-have” social networking application in Japan, where consumers are already familiar with an always-connected lifestyle, generating over a quarter million comments and photos per month.

Now PhotoCanvas joins a line-up of three other Big Canvas apps that let users personalize photos taken on the go with the iPhone and iPod Touch and, with PhotoShare, enjoy sharing them with others as easily as if they sent them in a text message.

“We are still in the very early stage of a true ‘mobile computing’ era enabled by the iPhone,” Satoshi Nakajima, CEO of Big Canvas told us. “The mobile phone started as a voice communication device, and evolved into a text-based communication device with SMS (texting). This is the beginning of the ‘visual communication’ era, and the large number of photo applications on the AppStore are proof of this.”

Unlike some of the more sophisticated photo editing apps that have shown up, such as Light and Photonasis, PhotoCanvas is a simple, easy to use tool for adding backgrounds, frames, text and drawing to an image, taking the everyday and turning it into something unique for sharing with others, using a few simple taps and strokes on the iPhone’s touch interface.

Creations can be saved to the iPhone’s camera roll and uploaded on the go to a user’s PhotoShare account, where family, friends, and other PhotoShare users can comment and respond to an image, creating an interactive, visual communication experience.

“One of the great things about PhotoShare is people share images in real time – it’s like a visual version of Twitter,” Nakajima told us. “It’s clear to me that the number of users who will edit their photos on mobile phones will eventually exceed the number of PhotoShop users on PC. PhotoCanvas is the beginning of our serious attempt to participate in this innovation.”

PhotoCanvas offers a number of preset backgrounds and photo frames that can be customized with drawing and text rendered in 48 colors and two dozen font faces, all of which are accessed and applied through an easy-to-use, intuitive UI that makes good use of Apple’s mobile platform design.

Available now in the AppStore for $1.99, PhotoCanvas is a great complement to the free PhotoShare service for anyone wanting to add some flair to their visual communication on the go.

A confession: as a teenager, I got involved with amateur acting and ended up doing a great deal of improvisation. Every Sunday evening a gang of us would get together in a tiny theatre just yards from the beach, where we would play improvisation games until we fell over.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember those games, to conjure up just the right one for just the right moment.

Enter stage right: iProv, the improvisation database for iPhone. It contains over 250 improv games. They’ve been sorted using tags, you can search through the list, and create your own list of faves by just tapping a star. Feeling lucky? Open a random game idea by just shaking the iPhone.

iProv is free on the App Store, although you can make donations at the web site if you want to support ongoing development.

Not long ago, I reviewed Altec Lansing’s expressionist CLASSIC PC speakers and found them great value for the money. After listening to them for a while beyond the publication of that review, I still loved the sound quality from those $80 speakers but found myself wishing for a little more oomph on the bottom end.

Well, I should have known Altec had already thought of that. Ingeniously engineered into the small-footprint housing of their Expressionist BASS computer speakers, powerful 4″ (100mm) long-throw subwoofers deliver all the lows that are typically missing from the little speakers you find sitting on desks all over the world.

Of course, you could spend lots of money on high-fidelity audio components for a computer set-up, which in many cases would include a separate subwoofer that sits at your feet or hides somewhere nearby, effectively dispersing the low frequency signals you need to get a truly rich audio experience on the computer. Altec Lansing has managed to put that all together for you in a pair of attractive desktop cones that are super easy to hook up and sound great without breaking the bank.

Twin 1 ½” drivers deliver mid and high frequencies so vocals and details come through with the clarity you expect from the company’s long history as a quality speaker manufacturer, and the sub-drivers in each speaker really do provide that punch-in-the-head color you want from your online gameplay, movie watching and YouTube browsing. They also have an auxiliary input for conveniently connecting portable CD, DVD, and MP3 players.

To get the most out of these speakers I had to play around with the EQ in my iTunes app to correct for their increased bass response, but once I got everything balanced the way I wanted it, I found I could actually listen to all sounds from my computer at a lower overall volume than previously and now, two weeks into using them, I find I actually mute the computer volume quite a bit less than I used to, and I work with music on in the background more as well.

For $130, Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass computer speakers could help you come to love computer audio.

When the new iLife 09 package was announced, I was pretty keen to get my hands on a copy. Some of the features in iPhoto – face recognition, photos on maps – looked too good to be true.

Turns out they *were* too good to be true.

Now that iPhoto 09 has “upgraded” my photo library, I’m cursing myself for installing it. Allow me to explain why.

I *do* like the new features. The face recognition is a little haphazard, but it works most of the time. Seeing photos mapped is also very cool and a great idea for browsing through a large collection.

But you pay a price for these new features. iPhoto 09 includes plenty of new eye candy and interface snazz which is having a detrimental effect on my photo browsing. Photos now animate into view when selected for editing or viewed full-screen. Each photo can be flipped upside down to add metadata, an idea copied from Dashboard widget behavior.

The net result of all this animated swishery is my MacBook’s fans going bananas, and the machine slowing down noticeably when I’m browsing or editing. Frustrating doesn’t cover it: this is maddening, when I stop to consider how smooth and easy and processor-friendly everything was with iPhoto 08.

Another frustration (a minor one, I’ll concede) is that the built-in Flickr upload offers very little in the way of options. Every upload creates a new Flickr set, even if you’re uploading just one image.

What seems to be missing, in my view, is some flexibility in the preferences. If I could simply switch off the eye candy, and tweak the Flickr upload defaults, I’d be a much happier bunny.

In the meantime though, I’m a bit of a grumpy one, and wishing I was still using iLife 08.

I think I need a beer. Yes.

Proof once again that it’s the *software* that makes the iPhone camera, QuadCamera is my latest favorite thing from the App Store.

It turns your iPhone into something like a Lomo Action Sampler, only one with much, much more flexibility than the its traditional film-loading counterpart.

This is Trunk, and it’s possibly the most interesting and enticing iPhone app I’ve seen for weeks.

You’ve got to love Japanese developer Yuki Yasoshima, whose free stopwatch app hit the iTunes AppStore this week. The version of the app on sale in the US store is “English,” but nowhere in the AppStore description is a word of it actually in English, just the same Japanese character information found on Yasoshima’s website, which is also in, yes, Japanese.

Now, that’s confidence in your product!

Fortunately, Big StopWatch is dead intuitive. Not to mention elegant, graphically boss and accurate to the 100th of a second.

If any of our Japanese-savvy readers want to take a shot at Yasoshima’s app description, it’s appended after the jump. Please let us know what we’re missing in comments.

I’ve spent a week or so playing around with the beta release of Picasa for Mac, and here are some thoughts.

• – It’s FAST. It does a superb job of pulling in your iPhoto collection in no time at all. Scrolling through it all is much faster than similar scrolling in iPhoto itself.

• – It’s considerate. It makes a point of co-existing with iPhoto, and asks nicely for your permission before making a copy of an image that’s being edited. As a consequence, it means people can try Picasa out without worrying about damage to their iPhoto database.

• – It finds your photos without fuss. Start it up, and it pokes around in all the usual places (and any other places you instruct it to poke in), looking for new pictures. These then get neatly added to the archive.

• – It does things my mum will love. The collages, the integration with Picasa Web Albums – these are features I have little interest in myself, but my mum (who has never got on well with iPhoto) will love them.

• – I like the the color searches (as shown in the photo above). Ask it to find “red” stuff and it will. Great for collages, photo books, or artistic projects.

Naturally, as with any beta, there are going to be some teething problems. One bug I’ve noticed is that right-clicking on an image and selecting “Move to (named) album” doesn’t work. And Picasa does seem to take a loooooong time to look through the images already on the camera, and decide if they are duplicates or not. But it does get there in the end.

Beta status or not, Picasa offers a decent alternative for photo management for people who don’t want to spend the kind of money required for Aperture or Lightroom.

OK so the name isn’t quite as snappy as Quicksilver, but the intent is very similar. And at least one of the developers is exactly the same.

Google’s new Quick Search Box for Mac was coded in part by Alcor, aka Nicholas Jitkoff, aka the guy who created Quicksilver and made keyboard-centric launchers the big hit they are today (on pretty much every platform, not just OS X).

This beta release is a good start. It doesn’t spend ages cataloguing your hard disk (at least, not in an intrusive, tie-your-Mac-up-for-minutes sort of way). And the architecture is designed for expansion; more features can be plugged in via, um, plugins.

Note that this is NOT the same as the Google Desktop Search app that you might have played with a while back. Desktop Search used the same Command+Command shortcut but made much greater demands on your system (at least, that’s how I remember it – it lasted about a day on my machine before I removed it, dissatisfied to put it mildly). I’m not very clear right now whether or not Quick Search Box is a replacement for Desktop Search, although I suspect that is the case, or will be in the medium to long term.

The only thing that the older Desktop Search product has got going for it is that it will run on Tiger, whereas the newer app is Leopard-only.

There’s a way to go yet. This new beast crashes, twice in the time it’s taken me to write these words. But hey, if Alcor’s in charge I have high hopes. High hopes indeed.

There are several “serenity” apps on the AppStore, though none may have the cache of Buddha Machine, an iPhone/iPod Touch version of the cultural icon brainchild of Beijing-based musicians Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian.

Calling themselves FM3, the two pioneers of electronic music in China have brought the idea of their simple, palm-sized box to iPhone and iPod Touch with a $4 app that offers 9 different ambient loops and a zen-like 3D depiction of the real-life Buddha Machine in 7 different colors activated in sequence by simple swipes of the touchscreen or randomly by shaking the device.

Virant was kind enough to offer me a promo code to check out the app and as with many things related to Buddha nature, its simplicity is both disarming and fascinating. The nine ambient loops, ranging in length from five to forty seconds, amazingly synced with the natural rhythm of my breathing, perfectly complementing a meditative mood or providing welcome refuge from modern urban distractions.

FM3 released the first corporeal Buddha Machines, each of which is said to contain a little Buddha, in 2005. Recently released 2.0 versions sell for around $20 and feature 9 new loops and a pitch control. Virant says he is working on an app version for the Buddha 2.0 with new sounds as well as pitch-shifting and a few other functions. It should be released in a month or two.

There are a bunch of guitar-oriented apps on the AppStore but the one demo’d in the video above, from developers at Frontier Design Group seems to have a lot of promise.

Called, simply, Guitar, unlike many of the instructional apps or glorified tuners out there, this app focuses on playablity. Chords and scales are easily assigned to its fretboard buttons, making it possible to strum chords, play melodies, or both. With over 1500 built-in chords, and a built-in chord editor to create custom chords, Guitar relies on a variety of realistically sampled sounds to provide surprising depth and nuance to what a user can play.

The most recently updated version of this $4 app, compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch, lets users record performances or create backing tracks that can be played along with. Recordings can also be backed up over the web to the Frontier Song Server, where they can be shared between multiple devices.

Guitar may not be as huge a hit as Ocarina, but it serves notice that Apple’s mobile gadgets are limited only by their users’ own imaginations.