Archive for category: Mac & OS X

Top Photoshop alternatives for Mac OSX

Top Photoshop alternatives for Mac OSX

PSDTuts has a great article covering Photoshop alternatives, for those who don’t need the power and expense of the king of all image editors. The top 5 are:

  • GIMP
  • Pixelmator (reviewed at Macworld.com)
  • Corel PaintShop Pro
  • PhotoLine
  • Pixel Image Editor

The article also goes on to cover some lightweight alternatives such as:

  • Adobe Photoshop Elements
  • Acorn (reviewed at Macworld.com)
  • Iris

While none of these applications offer the power and flexibility of Adobe Photoshop, most all of them have been around a while and have matured nicely. If your needs don’t warrant the Photoshop price tag, any one of these apps might just do the trick for you.

02/14/2008 Read More
Change Time Machine’s backup interval

Change Time Machine’s backup interval

If you’re running Leopard and you’re using Time Machine to backup your Mac to an external hard drive, you may become frustrated with how often Time Machine backs up your drive. This is especially true if you save or create a lot of files. When Time Machine is doing it’s work, your drive may become unresponsive, and at the very least, your backup drive can fill up quick. You could hack the .plist file to alter the intervals of Time Machine, but an easier way is to use TimeMachineEditor. TME provides a simple way for you to set the time(s) at which Time Machine does it’s thing.

02/07/2008 Read More
Add Adobe Kuler feature to OSX Leopard applications

Add Adobe Kuler feature to OSX Leopard applications

Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in for OSX Leopard that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of Adobe Kuler. Adobe kuler is an online community where you can explore, create, and share color themes. Once installed, Mondrianum acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker, available in any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. Apple’s own iWork and iLife suites, Adobe Photoshop, and other applications like Coda, CSSEdit, and many more, all work well with Mondrianum. Mondrianum combines the best of the community content on Kuler and the nativeness of Mac applications. If you work with colors on a Mac, be sure to check it out!< Thanks to Ivan at CreativeBits for pointing out this great tool for OSX.

01/31/2008 Read More
Get quick access to your media with iMedia Browser

Get quick access to your media with iMedia Browser

Do you like the media browser that Apple includes in some of its applications, but wish you could use it from any application? Now you can. Karelia has released iMedia Browser 1.0, a free media browser much like the one you find in Apple’s iWork suite and several other applications that tie-in with iLife apps. iMedia Browser allows quick access to your iPhoto collections, iTunes library, movies and Web links via a small window which you can add to by dragging other folders of media into. While this is nothing really earth-shaking, I like the fact that I have full access to my iPhoto library without actually having to launch iPhoto – which can take some time with thousands of photos in it. iMedia gave me access to all my photos and albums from iPhoto instantly. I simply drag a photo from iMedia Browser to my Photoshop icon to open it, or to an InDesign document to place it. Simple stuff!

01/09/2008 Read More
Getting things done with a little Anxiety

Getting things done with a little Anxiety

Getting things done (GTD) is all the rage these days. It’s all over the Web, with entire sites dedicated to helping you achieve a “honey-do”-free life. There are plenty of applications out there to help you as well.

Omni recently released OmniPlan at a cost of $149, and iGTD is another popular offering, especially since it’s free. The problem I have with the whole GTD movement is that I feel like you spend more time organizing and categorizing and less time doing. Most of the applications I’ve looked at require a lot of time to enter tasks, place them in proper categories, customize the interface to your needs and simply living in the app to actually get any use out of them. You spend more time trying to help yourself be productive than actually accomplishing your goal of getting things done.

01/01/2008 Read More
13 cool OSX Leopard tweeks via Terminal

13 cool OSX Leopard tweeks via Terminal

There are already many applications available which allow you to tweek the settings in OSX Leopard to adjust the dock, the menu bar, and other areas you wish to alter. But one thing that bothers me is having all those little apps hanging around my hard drive, or worse yet, running at all times. UsingMac has listed 13 very handy Terminal commands that do the same thing as many of these apps, without the space and memory overhead. It’s as simple as copy & paste. Check them out.

11/30/2007 Read More
How to create customized OSX Mail stationery in Leopard

How to create customized OSX Mail stationery in Leopard

This tutorial has been updated for Snow Leopard users! Please visit the updated article here. While not much has changed, I’ve edited it for a bit more clarity.

If you enjoy Leopard’s new Mail Stationery for sending beautiful HTML email, but wished you could personalize it more, read on for some very good news!Apple has made Mail’s new Stationery feature quite easy to edit to your heart’s content, as long as you have an image editor that can save .jpg and .png files, and an HTML editor such as Dreamweaver (or just text edit if you’re a die-hard HTML coder). Just follow these simple steps:

10/30/2007 Read More
Capture full Web page screenshots with Paparazzi!

Capture full Web page screenshots with Paparazzi!

I’ve posted a short review of Paparazzi!, a fantastic little screenshot application, over at CreativeBits. If you often find yourself piecing together screenshot images to give the appearance of a full page screenshot, then you’ll definitely want to give this review a quick read.

04/30/2007 Read More
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