Latest Posts in Mac Gems

Bluelounge CableDrop

Posted by Dan Frakes on

5 comments

Whew! If you’ve been paying attention to the Mac Gems Weblog for the past six weeks, you know that it’s been home to GemFest 2009, a Gem-a-day marathon of over 50 Gem reviews. We ended GemFest 2009 on Tuesday with a quick rundown of some of our all-time-favorite Gems, and today marks our return to the regular two-Gems-each-week schedule. I’ll get back to reviewing great, inexpensive Mac software next week, but today I’m going to tell you about an accessory Gem that I’ve been wanting to cover since I saw a prototype at Macworld Expo back in January.

As someone with a laptop, several external hard drives, and a handful of other accessories that are frequently connected and disconnected, one of my most-frequently-suffered computing annoyances is cables that fall behind my desk, forcing me to crawl underneath or sprawl across the top to retrieve them. (I can’t count the number of times I’ve lunged at a loose MagSafe power cord just as it’s about to slip over the edge, out of easy reach.) Over the years I’ve devised various makeshift mechanisms to prevent such mishaps: twist-tying cables together so that plugged-in cables will keep the others from falling; taping or nailing homemade cable clips to the desk; lodging loose cables under paperweights or other gear…the list is long. While most of these methods have worked, they’ve also tended to be ugly, kludgy, or a hassle to use—or a combination of the three.

Bluelounge’s CableDrop is the kind of solution I’ve been looking for. Each is a cute, rubber-like cable clasp, about one inch in diameter, with an adhesive back. You stick a CableDrop to your desk, to the wall behind it, or even to other items on the desk, and it keeps one or more cables—depending on the thickness of each cable—from falling. The clip’s “jaws” are sturdy enough to secure even the thickest FireWire cable, or several thin ones, but flexible enough that it’s easy to get cables in and out of the clip when needed. Bluelounge suggests CableDrops are also useful for routing cables to keep them out of sight and for storing earbuds (via a CableDrop stuck to the side of your desk or display) when not in use. I also recommend them for keeping track of which identically-looking cable connects to which device.

When I saw the prototype of a CableDrop at the Expo, I thought it was a great idea, but I was afraid that, like so many cool-but-simple accessories, Bluelounge would price the product at a premium. Thankfully, that isn’t the case, as a six-pack of CableDrops is only $10—a reasonable price, in my opinion, for a clever, useful, and attractive product. And in a welcome reprieve from expensive shipping rates for inexpensive items, that six-pack costs only $1.73 to ship via First Class Mail (to Macworld’s San Francisco offices, at least); two sets cost just $2.24 to ship.

CableDrop colors: Muted (top) and Bright (bottom)

You can get CableDrops in either of two color sets: Muted, which includes two each of beige, orange, and brown; and Bright, which includes two each of gold-yellow, pink, and lime-green. After testing out the review pack we received, I’m planning on buying a couple packs myself—and getting rid of the twist-ties, masking tape, metal clips, and paperweights.

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GemFest 2009: All-time favorite affordable software

Posted by Roman Loyola on

16 comments

With yesterday’s review of Plex, we wrap up our GemFest 2009. If you’re interested, you can see a complete list of the applications in our GemFest. You can also see a complete listing of these Gems in the August 2009 issue of Macworld. Our regular, twice-a-week Mac Gems column will resume on Thursday.

We’ve reviewed hundreds of affordable applications over the years, from tools with just a few key features to complex software that can compete with more-expensive programs. Some of the Gems we’ve found are applications we can’t live without. As a grand finale to GemFest 2009, here’s a list of some of our all-time favorite Mac Gems.

Got an affordable program that you can't live without? Tell us about it by posting in the comments section.

1Password () An excellent way to store and manage Internet passwords ($40; Agile Web Solutions.

Plex media center software competes with Front Row

Posted by Aayush Arya on

6 comments

[Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2009 series. Every day until the end of June 2009, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.]

It’s difficult to find a video cataloguing and playback application that rivals the formidable pairing of iTunes and Front Row. But now there’s Plex, a media center for Mac OS X that’s capable of cataloguing and playing back every major video format out there, and it works admirably with the Apple Remote to boot.

Unlike iTunes, Plex doesn’t make a copy of your media files and pull them into its own organized hierarchy, opting instead to let you control the folder structure of your media. Once you have your movies and television shows organized and renamed by release dates for movies and seasons for television shows, all you have to do is point the application to the folders in question and it automatically pulls the relevant information about all your media from various online sources such as the Internet Movie Database, the Online TV Database, and MTV. Furthermore, it also automatically adds all the media files from your iTunes library to its own, allowing you to take advantage of iTunes’ superior music organization along with Plex’s strengths in the video department.

Once you have your media added to Plex, you can use either the Apple Remote or the cursor keys on your keyboard to navigate through the interface and play your music, movies, and television shows. The interface is beautifully designed and easy to use. The folks behind Plex have done a good job of hiding the complexity of the application behind the contextual menu (invoked by pressing and holding the Menu button on the Apple Remote for a second or two or hitting the ‘C’ key on the keyboard) and preventing it from spilling onto the main interface. If you want to do some things manually like editing the title of an item, marking it as watched or unwatched, scanning for new content, or adding an item to your favorites list, that contextual menu allows you to do it all and then some.

SousChef: iTunes-like recipe organizer

Posted by Jackie Dove on

7 comments

As recipe collection moves out of the card box and into the computer, there has emerged a small cadre of Mac programs designed to help you find, categorize, share, display, and cook your food. SousChef 1.2 is a compact program with an iTunes-RSS feed sensibility that can help you get your meal off to a good start.

Recipe programs cater to different types of cooks: Some are looking for ease of use in importing and exporting recipes from their favorite Web sites; others are concerned with having a variety of import and export options available to view and share recipes while at friends’ homes; still others want to record every detail down to the grocery store aisle where ingredients are available. The programs I’ve seen recently vary according to how much detail the user wants, and how much customization and automation they require.

SousChef is somewhere in the middle. It’s not super automated, nor does it have an abundance of specialized sections. However, it’s simple, friendly, easy on the eyes, and offers some appealing and practical capabilities.

Cooliris helps showcase photos and videos

Posted by Kris Fong on

7 comments

Scrolling and clicking on Next links through tons of Web pages is not how I want to hunt down an elusive video or photo. Thankfully, there’s Cooliris, a super-handy browser plug-in that lets you scope out images and video content in a unique way, displaying everything in a full-screen, horizontally expanded, interactive 3-D “wall” view. It effectively eliminates the repetitive click-and-scroll tedium so you can find what you’re looking for fast.

Once you install the plug-in (which works with Firefox, Safari, and Flock), simply visit any supported Web site and either click the Cooliris button in your browser’s toolbar or mouse over a thumbnail and click the icon. Cooliris then takes over your screen, displaying all the page’s image or video content, plus all related content from subsequent pages, on the 3D wall. Searching through hundreds of Google images, YouTube videos, and Facebook photos has never been easier. And it works with your hard-drive-based images too, including those in iPhoto.

The browsing experience is interesting. Drag the slider at the bottom of the screen left or right and the wall suddenly flows into a 3-D space, yawing left or right as you fly past a multitude of seemingly never-ending thumbnails. It kind of feels as if you’re propelling yourself in an office chair past a gazillion TV displays in a dark, cavernous room with polished floors. I almost got motion sickness--it’s that smooth.

Once you find a desired image or video, click its thumbnail to get a bigger view or play the video, respectively. You can also view file info (such as a photo’s file size and dimensions, or a video’s length and YouTube rating), view an image full screen, play a photo slide show, jump to the actual file in the Finder, share files, and more. Cooliris also provides a Search function to scour content across Google, YouTube, Amazon.com, Hulu, Flickr, and more. Don’t know where to start? Click the Discover menu to gain access to popular content.

While my first take on Cooliris was that it was something of an eye-candy browser accoutrement, it’s now my go-to tool whenever I need to search through multiple pages of image or video content. My wrist has never been happier.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox. You can also follow MacGems on Twitter.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Kris Fong is a freelance writer.]

VideoDrive makes video file conversions easy

Posted by Jeff Carlson on

3 comments

If you buy or rent movies from the iTunes Store, you’re already using iTunes as your preferred media organizer and player, especially if iTunes is acting as the gateway to an iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. But iTunes isn’t the only source for digital video—perhaps, for instance, you want to make your DVD collection available on your Apple TV. Although several utilities are available to rip a DVD to a file on your hard disk, iTunes is picky about the settings required to play on the many devices it syncs with.

In addition to converting movie files to iTunes-friendly formats, VideoDrive can import useful metadata from the Web.

Aroona’s VideoDrive aims to make those conversions easy. Acting as a friendly middleman between your video files and iTunes, it encodes videos using QuickTime (and, optionally, El Gato’s Turbo.264 hardware device and software for faster performance), pulls metadata from IMDB.com over the Web, and hands the formatted files to iTunes. If you have Perian and Flip4Mac installed, VideoDrive can also convert nearly any video format for use with Apple devices.

If you have a lot of videos to process, you can drag them to a Hot Folder in the Finder that automatically adds them to VideoDrive’s import queue; from there, simply choose how you want the files added to iTunes. I didn’t run into any serious troubles using the software; the hiccups that did occur were due to other applications VideoDrive relies on (such as Turbo.264) getting hung up on a dialog box, or finding that a file I was converting already existed in the destination folder. VideoDrive does an admirable job of making video importing easy.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox. You can also follow MacGems on Twitter.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Jeff Carlson is the author of the forthcoming iMovie ‘09 & iDVD: Visual QuickStart Guide (Peachpit Press).]

Tangerine creates iTunes playlists based on tempo

Posted by Kris Fong on

2 comments

The playlist, to the music lover, is one of the greatest innovations since the volume knob, thanks to the ease of copying digital music. Instead of spending hours crafting the perfect mix tape, you can quickly create a playlist on the fly in iTunes. Whether you want music for driving, running, soothing your broken heart, or paying tribute to the greatest hair metal bands of all time, if you’ve got the songs, creating a suitable playlist is easy.

Creating a playlist that’s appropriate for an exercise routine isn’t so easy, however. Choosing more upbeat songs will get you halfway there, until you road test your handiwork and realize that one minute you’re running pace-to-pace with Van Halen’s “Panama” and the next minute Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish” kicks in and breaks your stride. It’s the exercise equivalent of a hiccup. That’s where Potion Factory’s Tangerine comes into play.

PulpMotion creates professional multimedia presentations

Posted by Kris Fong on

5 comments

Apple’s iPhoto slideshow presentations are nice—if you’re not suffering from Ken Burns effect burnout. Keynote gives you more transitions and provides themes that work well for corporate presentations. But if you’re looking to create slideshows that are more engaging, fun, and eye catching, PulpMotion produces professional multimedia presentations that are anything but ordinary.

PulpMotion uses motion themes to add character to slideshows, letting you create a more visually stimulating showcase for your photos and videos. It comes with a bunch of themes, many of which include variations; most are surprisingly useful. You get everything from 3-D transitional effects, museum walkthroughs, and gallery spaces to cinema-style graphic treatments, 3-D animations, and themes for your vacation, holiday, wedding, and other photos. And, of course, the ol’ pan-and-scan standby is in here too. More themes are available from the Aquafadas site.

Shape Collage turns a collection of photos into creative collages

Posted by Kris Fong on

2 comments

You’ve probably made a few photo collages in your lifetime, whether you laid out photos with the perfect amount of messy randomness in a photo album or magnetized a grouping on your fridge. But in the digital world, there’s not a lot out there that lets Mac users do the deed easily. I’ve painstakingly used Photoshop, Pages, and even iWeb to create collages, but nothing compares to the quickness and ease of Shape Collage.

Shape Collage turns a collection of photos into a collage of practically any shape, whether you’re going for a traditional design or something totally out there. The interface is easy to use. You can select one of the preset shapes (a rectangle, heart, or circle) and type some text, or use a custom shape, which you draw within the app or import, to create something unique.

Creating custom-shaped collages in Shape Collage can be fun.

To select images, simply drag and drop photos from the Finder or iPhoto (including Events) into the interface, or have Shape Collage pull images from your Facebook, Flickr, or other Web page. Then select a shape or type text. You can also alter the size, number of photos used, photo spacing, background image, photo border, photo rotation, and shadows. Then click the Preview button to view a randomly generated wire frame of the layout. Once you have a layout you like, click Create to generate the final image as a PNG, JPEG, or even Photoshop (PSD) file for further editing (major brownie points here for the developer).

For traditional collages, the rectangle shape and a handful of photos works best (I like the clean look of selecting None for Rotation under the Advanced tab), but for custom shapes and text creations, you may need more images than you think to give the shape better definition. While I had plenty of vacation photos to make a “Europe” text collage easily comprehensible, a custom “leaf” shape I drew using all 38 of my fall colors pics looked like an elongated blob. To compensate, set a higher number of photos to duplicate images when needed.

While creating custom shapes was quirky good fun, I’m not sure I’d put this app to real use, but for creating more standard collages and photo text, Shape Collage is truly priceless.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox. You can also follow MacGems on Twitter.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Kris Fong is a freelance writer.]

Web2 Delight lets you easily download videos from YouTube

Posted by Aayush Arya on

15 comments

As great as video sharing Web sites like YouTube are, they often don’t allow you to directly download the videos on their site. Web2 Delight doesn’t just make this possible; it makes the whole process positively painless.

To download a photo or video from any of the Web sites listed in Web2 Delight’s sidebar (YouTube, Veoh, blip.tv, Dailymotion, Flickr, Picasa, Webshots, and Photobucket), all you have to do is select the site you want in the sidebar and run a search. Once the video you’re looking for shows up in the viewing pane below, you can roll your mouse over the thumbnails and click the Download button that appears. In the case of YouTube, you can also copy the video URL from your Web browser and paste it into Web2 Delight to have it download the video (although it refuses to download more than one video at once in this manner). All downloaded videos are accessible from within the application itself, and can also be transferred to iTunes (in an iPod-compatible format) at the click of a button.

The saved search feature of Web2 Delight makes it easy to keep track of and download the latest videos being uploaded to video sharing websites like YouTube.

The application features various viewing modes, such as list view, thumbnail view, and Cover Flow (although it seems to have a bug that prevents it from loading the thumbnails in Cover Flow mode). It also allows for saved searches and smart collections, and throws in some rudimentary adult content filtering capabilities for good measure. Also of note is the fact that Web2 Delight lets you download higher quality videos from YouTube whenever they are available.

Although there are a few user interface elements that need to be worked on, Web2 Delight’s overall utility and simplicity make it worth the price.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox. You can also follow MacGems on Twitter.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Aayush Arya is a journalism student from India and regular contributor to Macworld. His online haunts include his blog, Penned Thoughts, and his Twitter feed.]