2006 Holiday Gift Ideas: Software

Hey folks,

We could use a few more suggestions in this category - it's a little
thin for this year, and I'm sure there are some cool programs out
there that would be appropriate.

cheers... -Adam

I'm a fan of software that further add value to hardware that we already have. This year, the number of Mac webcams out there must have increased dramatically, since most models of Macs come with one built-in.

So after sending each other facial contortions via Photobooth, try iStopMotion. This allows users to create stop motion animation resembling that from "Nightmare Before Christmas". It includes onion-skinning and previews. Both are hard to desribe, but are useful in the animation-making process. The movies on the site explain it better.

http://www.istopmotion.com/

Not sure if this has been pointed to yet, but the sound editing
program Fission from Rogue Amoeba (http://www.rogueamoeba.com/) is a
great little piece of software.

It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles but what it does --
basic, loseless editing of sound files and metadata editing -- it
does very well. There are user controllable fades at both ends of
audio splits, and you can save (through QuickTime) in different audio
formats (i.e. AIFF) The learning curve is pretty much flat. (It's
being pitched, in part, for the ease with which you can edit MP3s and
ACC files into ringtones.)

Price is $32, and there's a $14-off coupon available for owners of
Audio Hijack Pro which.

Mark Hamilton

May I suggest BuddyPop <http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/buddypop/> ?

BuddyPop is a tiny background application to access your address book
without having to open Addressbook. Press a configurable key combination,
and a small window pops up. Type some letters and after a return the
Addressbook entry that matches best pops up. By clicking the entries fields
you can copy the phone number or email address, send an email with your
preferred email application, email, dial the number (via modem) and do
various other actions, like opening Addressbook to edit a entry. It also
shows caller ID when your Bluetooth enabled cell phone rings.

There is a Universal version and it only costs 10 Euro, which is just a bit
more than 10 USD.

--
mare (http://www.peghole.com)

I really have enjoyed the group of games from GlennsGames.com. It is a fun bunch of easy games that can be purchased individually or as a group via download or all of the selections on a CD. They are great for winding down or keeping busy if you are surfed out and waiting on a download.

Regards, Broderick Bohls

SANDVOX

If you know anyone who wants to set up a blog, a family photo album, or a
simple to moderate website, but who does not know HTML or CSS, I recommend
Sandvox from karelia.com. Template-based, with nice templates. The standard
version is all they will need; the "pro" version benefits only those who
know how to craft bits and pieces with HTML or javascript for insertion into
the site. It's $49. I put together a site for our church in 3-4 days that
looks great and serves all its needs. It has the benefit of producing
standards-compliant HTML and CSS.
--

Allen Watson . Writer/Webmaster [ p. 503 .281 .0250 m. 503 .916 .9411
e. watson.allencomcast.net
homepage.mac.com/allen_a_watson/

SAFT

For the person who spends lots of times surfing the Internet with Safari,
Saft is an indispensible plug-in that adds a host of very, very useful
features to Safari, such as saving bookmarks directly into subfolders from
the bookmarks bar menus (navigate to the folder you want, select "Add
Bookmark Here"); crash protection that restores pages that were open when
you crashed; ability to consolidate open windows into tabs; and so on. $12,
find it on Versiontracker.com.

I love utility programs. Here are a couple of my favorites.

Versomatic
<http://www.acertant.com/>
It automatically makes a backup copy of your file every time you make a change to it.

Path Finder
<http://www.cocoatech.com/pf4/>
Here is what Apple should have done with Finder. I've replaced it with this program.

Ryoichi Morita

Every time I give someone TextExpander, they can't believe they could ever live without it. If you were clever, you could create a snippet file customized for your gift recipient. Add snippets for address, phone number, and date of birth. Think of something personal: depending who they were, they might like it if "gth" expanded into "Go Tar Heels". You can export the snippets using "Save a copy of all snippets..." under "Snippets" in TextExpander preferences. The recipient can import the file into TextExpander.

http://www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander

DiscLabel is great software for making gifts, so I don't know if that counts. And I don't want to be too shameless promoting SmileOnMyMac products. :-)

I have found eBay auction management software running on the Mac to be few and far between and batch insertion virtually not available. This program is just what I need, though, since it imports data from my File Maker Pro 5 database and with a little work on my part tailors it for ebay batch insertion. The only drawback is that it does not import from the later versions of File Maker Pro. Hope fully that will come soon.

Of course, you do not have to have a FM Pro database to take advantage of AG. In fact, probably few do. Just insert your auction information in the item by item records and you are set to make a fortune.

It is a universal application so it will work at top speed on Intel Macs as well as others running X 10.1 or higher.

http://auctiongenie.luxcentral.com/

Al Woodcock ebay id: the paperguy ebay rating: over 3000 last time I checked

For those looking for basic music notation software, you can't beat Finale Notepad, especially at the price-free.

<http://www.finalemusic.com/notepad/>

-- Alan D. Neubert semaphoreworldnet.att.net

Have you counted the number of passwords you're using with your Mac
recently? Nowadays, we need a password for just about anything:
network access, iTunes Store, email account, internet banking, blog
access, etc., etc. If you're looking for software to conventiently
and safely store all those passwords, Waterfall Software's "Wallet"
is a great choice.

Wallet's elegant user interface has the same look-and-feel like Mac
OS X's Address Book, showing a list of Groups, the list of Entries
within the selected Group, and the selected Entry itself. What makes
Wallet special is that, unlike most similar applications, you can
create your own groups and also freely configure the data fields for
the entries within each group. For example, the pre-configured credit
card group lists "Type," "Number," "Security Code," and "Expiration
Date" for each entry, but you could easily add "ATM PIN" or
"Emergency Phone Number" fields.

Additional features include auto-filling web forms in Safari or even
synchronizing selected entries with your iPod. Of all the password
management applications I know, Wallet is by far the most pleasant to
use, and with a price tag of $14.95, it provides a lot of peace-of-
mind for the buck.

<http://www.waterfallsw.com/wallet/>


Jochen.

[FYI, all messages to this thread that you receive on or after 08-Dec-06 were not included in the gift issue, which went out last night. -Adam]

On 6-Dec-2006, at 15:45, Jochen Wolters wrote:
> Have you counted the number of passwords you're using with your Mac
> recently? Nowadays, we need a password for just about anything:
> network access, iTunes Store, email account, internet banking, blog
> access, etc., etc. If you're looking for software to conventiently
> and safely store all those passwords, Waterfall Software's "Wallet"
> is a great choice.

Ermm.. OS X has a great application for storing passwords built in to
it. It's called the Keychain.

I put EVERYTHING in it, including credit card info, RMA info,
SHipping info, and more. The ability to easily stick a secure note
makes it the store house for all my secure data bits.

I love VisualHub. I use it to convert all my TiVo downloaded images to MP4
and DVD.
<http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/>

A feature I really want to try, but can't as I only have 1 Mac, is XGrid
encoding which uses Apple's XGrid technology to distribute video encoding
to many Mac processors.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/xgrid/>

Previously I had to use a PC to strip the DRM from the TiVo files, but the
DRM has recently been broken and a program made available for Mac and Linux
users. I haven't tested it yet, but it should now be possible to download
and move TiVo content to various formats all from a Mac.

<http://tivodecode.sourceforge.net/>

Kevin

AuctionGenie is AFAIK one of the big 3 eBay submission software. All 3 have various additional features like auction-tracking, bidding, post-victory moves etc.

With all due respect, please try GarageSale (my preferred) and iSale (Apple Design Award 2005 runner up) before paying the shareware fee (annual for AuctionGenie).

http://www.iwascoding.com/GarageSale/

http://www.equinux.com/us/products/isale/index.html

Those using Parallels/Windows, can use eBay's own free Turbo Lister.

For secure storage of passwords and other information you want to keep under wraps (credit-card numbers, SSNs, lock combinations, software license codes, etc), I recommend SplashID <http://www.splashdata.com/splashid/index.htm>. It not only keeps your secrets on your Mac, but synchronizes with your Palm or other PDA.

--Ham Richards

As reported in Ars Technica Infinite Loop journal yesterday, the MacHeist Web site has a really nice bundle of Mac ShareWare, several of which have been reviewed in TidBits. A CD burned with the downloaded applications including the purchased license keys would be a great stocking stuffer. Only 5 days left for this offer so hurry! If enough people purchase it additional items will be added to the bundle. I just bought a copy for my daughter. $49.00 buys a bundle worth more than $280.00, with 25% of your purchase going to a charitable organization.

<http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/12/11/6239#Comments> <http://macheist.com/>

Good afternoon,

On 13/12/06 at 3:33 PM -0800, mrth <mrthsciarc.com> wrote:

>As reported in Ars Technica Infinite Loop journal yesterday,
>the MacHeist Web site has a really nice bundle of Mac
>ShareWare, several of which have been reviewed in TidBits. A CD
>burned with the

I have no opinions on the value of the software bundle, but I
did find this Daring Fireball article an interesting read about MacHeist.

<http://daringfireball.net/2006/12/iniquities_of_the_selfish>


Charlie

--
    Charlie Garrison <garrisonzeta.org.au>
    PO Box 141, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia

That was a very interesting article. My one comment on it is that there is an additional benefit to the developers in that they do get many new customers which, as Gruber points out, adds to their tech support load for little added revenue to them. However, I have heard it said that independent developers make much of their money on upgrades. I note that iClip is moving to 4.0 soon (and while you get a beta unlock key, it is unclear if that key covers the release version as well), Delicious Library is moving to 2.0 soon, and so forth. At least half of the bundle are shortly moving to a new, major upgraded version. This means that in some sense, these authors are being given a chance to make money the may not otherwise be making: first the flat fee, however disproportionate it may be in toto when this is all done and then in upgrade fees which may more than make up for it.

-A



--
Andy J. Williams Affleck
Author: Take Control of Podcasting on the Mac: <http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/podcasting-mac.html >
Podcast: <http://tcopodcasting.podbus.com/>
Blog: <http://www.raggedcastle.com/webcrumbs/>
Profile: <http://www.linkedin.com/in/aaffleck>

Quoting Marilyn Matty <mmattynyc.rr.com>:

> New Yorkers will remember the all consuming, ever burning, televised
> and commercial free loop of a Yule Log that WPIX Channel 11 ran for
> 24 hours on December 25th, accompanied with non-stop kitchy Christmas
> music.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yule_Log_(TV_program)
>
> Though Channel 11 is now owned by the Tribune Company, who has
> revived the Yule Log holiday tradition by digitally remastering the
> loop, running it in the NY metro area and nationally via affiliates,
> and also making it available for download at their site, and as a
> Podcast:

Apparently the Yule Log has gone HD so those of us with brand new
HDTV's can enjoy it in all it's glory. Apparently INHD has been
carrying their own version of the Yule Log in HD since 2003.

<http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061217/ap_en_tv/tv_yule_duel>