The Graphic Mac

I’m not sure how well that will go-over with Gmail users. Personally, I feel like the Gmail service already lacks enough features that they should focus solely on email features, rather than adding non-email ones. At the same time, I feel like email is a private thing, and I don’t necessarily want any sign of “socialization” in there at all. Besides, the Gmail interface is already a cluttered mess as it is, I’m not sure how they could work-in social networking without making it completely unusable.

I’ve been longing for a way to update my Facebook and Twitter status in a single location that I’m already using; something that fits into my existing workflow.

There are plenty of services out there that would allow me to update my social networks, but they would require me to visit yet another Web site to do it, and that means yet another set of usernames and passwords to remember. No thanks.

With Twitter having the lock on micro-blogging, and Facebook having 400 million users and an expanding feature list, including the world’s largest photo-sharing service and reports of a full-blown email Web-client coming, you have to wonder just how long Google can afford to sit on the sidelines and watch.

Google recently released the first public beta of their Chrome browser for Mac. While it’s speedy as heck, it lacks many basic features such as bookmark management/organization. Another popular feature the Mac version lacks is extension support. That is, until now. READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE.

If you’re a Facebook user and are looking for a simple, unobtrusive way to view updates on your Mac OS X desktop, look no further than Facebook’s own menubar application. Facebook Desktop Notifications lives in your menubar, keeping your Dock and desktop free of icons, but easily accessible. The app displays your news feed in the drop down menu, which when clicked will take you to the appropriate place on your Facebook page. Shortcuts to your Facebook page, and new message creation are available at the top of the menu, as well as direct message shortcuts at the bottom. Desktop Notifications also offers you the ability, with a simple keyboard shortcut, to update your Facebook status via a simple input box. New Facebook notifications make the menubar icon turn blue, or if you have Growl installed, a popup Growl window appears. While there are a ton of applications that do a whole lot more, few offer the simplicity and “get out of my way” nature that Facebook Desktop Notifications does. For that reason, I love it. It’s stable, and does its job without me having to do or launch anything.

Adobe AIR apps are popping-up everywhere, so it was no surprise to see a full-featured Facebook application show up. What was surprising to me was to see that the developer is Adobe itself. Photo Uploader for Facebook is a multi-platform Facebook desktop application based on Adobe’s AIR technology. And while the name implies that it’s simply a photo uploader, it’s actually more full-featured than that. It’s not going to replace the use of the Web interface completely, but for most users, the app may do everything you need. Photo Uploader for Facebook offers views of your Profile page, Friends list, a Chat page, and of course, your Wall. The Wall page shows status updates of all your friends, as well as gives you the ability to update your status by clicking on your latest status update at the top of the screen.

The app updates status at intervals that I couldn’t find a way to customize, but it appears to be fairly frequently. The chat screen works just like the Web-based chat feature does, with the added benefit that you can keep the chat window open and surf to other pages in your browser at the same time. The sidebar in the app window shows status updates, regardless of which view the main part of the window is showing. Quick access to Event Invites, your Inbox, Pokes and Friend Requests are also available via small icons at the top of the sidebar. The Photo Uploader offers basic Facebook integration. Upon clicking the Upload button, you are asked to choose which album you want your image to be uploaded into, or create a new one. Then, you drag & drop, or click the Add Photos button to bring in a single image, or folder full of images into the app’s window. From there, you can crop your image, rotate it, give it a caption, and tag it with keywords. I prefer to use desktop applications, rather than a service’s Web interface in almost all cases. I find them to (usually) be more full featured and easier to work with. I am not, however, a big fan of AIR applications – for a variety of reasons. Photo Uploader for Facebook is a rare exception to my anti-AIR preference. It’s stable, offers plenty of features, and I find the interface to be simple, and a big improvement over Facebook’s Web interface. Photo Uploader for Facebook can be downloaded and used for free from the Adobe AIR Marketplace, where you can find plenty of other AIR applications.

idée inc. has a fantastic image-search tool that looks through over 10 million Creative Commons images on Flickr based on the color of your choosing. You simply click the color palette on the page to select up to 10 colors at a time and the site displays a wall of image thumbnails which use a predominant amount of the color(s) you chose. While clicking a single color yields impressive results, clicking a few more colors displays a new set of thumbnails (extremely quickly) with remarkable results! I find this site to be incredibly useful, and worthy of bookmarking.

Think affiliate programs are solely the province of SEO firms and experts? Think again. There’s such a thing as a malware affiliate program, and a very recent one targets Mac users specifically. It’s a sign that cyber-crime is beginning to target Apple more aggressively than it has in the past. Darrell Etherington over at TheAppleBlog has an informative article; There’s a Bounty On Your Mac: 43 Cents Per Malware Infection. With the popularity of the Mac operating system growing more and more every year, it’s wise to stay informed about the potential of virus and malware heading our way.

The Graphic Mac was one of the many Twitter users featured over at Smashing Magazine this past week in their article Effective Twitter Backgrounds. The article discusses different ways you can brand yourself, your company or your product on Twitter via the use of the background image customization on your Twitter page.

While many users have long since moved on to dedicated Twitter applications on their desktop, many still make an effort to visit a user’s Twitter page just to read up on their recent postings and check out their graphics and bio information; so it’s still important that you customize your page. The article certainly offers quite a bit of inspiration if you’re looking to redesign your Twitter page, and I was pleasantly surprised to see The Graphic Mac listed!

If you find yourself taking screenshots a lot, you no doubt dumped Mac OSX’s built-in screen capture utility long ago. My preferred screen capture app is Snapz Pro. But the one area that few apps do well is capture an entire Web page (including the portion not currently on screen). There are a few stand-alone apps that can do this, but most require you to manually type the URL into the app for it to work.

Since I use Firefox, I have a few options available that are fully integrated into the browser to accomplish the task. My favorite is Pearl Crescent Page Saver (PCPS). PCPS adds a little camera icon to your toolbar that allows you to save an entire Web page, the visible portion of the page, or a single frame on the page as a .jpg or .png file. If you don’t care for a button in the toolbar, you can also assign a keyboard shortcut, or use the contextual menu it adds to the browser. PCPS works perfectly capturing a page, including a page containing Flash content, an area that many screen capture utilities seem to have great difficulty with. PCPS offers several more configuration options that make working with it a productive experience, particularly for bloggers with a fixed-width site. PCPS not only allows you to set the file format, including the JPG quality, but you can customize the output size of the image by percentage or pixel-width dimensions. Your image is ready to upload immediately. You can even have a custom naming convention set up via the preferences. There are several add-ons that offer screen-capture capability to Firefox, but I’ve found Pearl Crescent Page Saver to be stable, reliable, and offering just enough in the way of customization to satisfy my needs.