The coolest looking mouse around for under $30

Spectrum Mouse

I came across the Spectrum Optical Wired Mouse from Satechi and thought it was so cool that I had to share it. For $25 (regularly $30) you get a wired 1000 dpi optical mouse with scroll wheel.

The chrome appearance looks slick enough, but the cool part starts when you flick the switch on the bottom of the mouse to the On position. The bright LED lights inside the mouse cycle through blue, yellow, violet, turquoise, white, red, and green. To illuminate a single color, switch to the Lock position when the desired color is achieved. The LEDs can be turned off by switching to the Off position.

At $25, it’s worth grabbing one, if for no other reason than just to have around as a spare. I plan on getting one and setting it to blue to match the blue glow emanating from the USB hub on my desk.

The story of Adobe Illustrator

When Adobe Illustrator first shipped in 1987, it was the first software application for a young company that had, until then, focused solely on Adobe PostScript. The new product not only altered Adobe’s course, it changed drawing and graphic design forever.

Put a handy calendar in your Mac menubar

Pop-Calendar

A few years back I had an app that would show a simple calendar icon in the menubar which when clicked would drop down a simple calendar of the current month. It did nothing else, but it was useful to me to be able to see a full month calendar. But it stopped working long ago. I gave up looking for a simple replacement.

A few days ago I came across Pop-Calendar from Magnesium-App. Pop-Calendar is a free utility that placed the date in a calendar icon in your menubar. When you click the icon, you can view the entire year at once or single month view (click the screenshot above for a larger view) by clicking on the month name. Pop-Calendar will remember which you view you used last, but you can switch at any time.

Pop-Calendar uses Apple’s built-in Calendar app to display all your events in either view. When you click on an individual day, you can see the day’s events. You can also add new calendar events simply by clicking a small + icon at the top of the pop-up window that appears when clicking on a day.

Pop-Calendar offers the ability to set a keyboard shortcut to show the window, as well as the ability to turn on and off individual calendars from Apple’s Calendar app. That’s all there is to it, and that’s why I love it!

Beside being free, simple to use, and easy on the eyes, it already works in Mac OS X Yosemite—though I do hope the developer adds transparency once Yosemite ships in the fall. Pop-Calendar is available directly from the developer’s site, or in the Mac App Store.

Free and easy audio control for your Mac with AudioMate

AudioMate

Control all your audio input and output devices from the status bar, receive system notifications when relevant events happen on your audio devices, change the master output volume, sample rate, clock source, system default input and output and more!

AudioMate has gone open source, and is now free. Requires OS X 10.7 or later and a 64-bit Mac.

Snapwire offers quality free photos

Snapwire photos

I’ve written about free stock photo sites I’ve found in the past. Recently, I came across Snapwire and thought I would share it with you all. Snapwire offers seven free photos every seven days. The photos all feature a CC1.0 license, which means they’re free to use in any way you wish. The site appears to be fairly new, so there isn’t a large collection built-up just yet. Hopefully it continues on for a long time.

Photoshop Mix for iPad

Adobe Photoshop Mix gives you powerful, easy-to-use tools that let you combine and cut out images, apply looks, and make nondestructive edits on your iPad — all compatible with Adobe Photoshop CC.

The short video at the top of the page shows the general idea behind the app. Looks pretty cool. I wish my son would let me use his iPad so I could try it out.