OS X Image Editors

There are many image manipulation programs available for OS X.

In particular, we've recently seen the release of Acorn and Pixelmator, which use the Core Image facilities built in to OS X that take advantage of the GPU in your graphics card, thereby providing realtime rendering of most transformations.

Here's a nice comparison of both of these, plus DrawIt, which is one I'd not heard of until I read the article.

Be Still, My Heart

Yanko Design has a mock-up of a Mac tablet that I'd buy in a heartbeat if it really existed.

The integrated wireless keyboard is what does it for me. Plus, it just looks beautiful!

Leopard Delayed?!

I'm just hoping that it's a late April Fool's joke, but according to this article over on Engadget, Leopard won't be released until October.

They say it's because they had to steal resources from the OS X team to work on iPhone.

Mind you, having looked at Leopard recently, I'm not sure I really care. None of the announced features were of any interest to me.

Hopefully, by October, that will have changed.

The Quick Silver "Comma Trick"

Merlin Mann recently started an online video show, which consists mainly of interviews, but also the occasional productivity snippet.

Merlin is a big fan of Quick Silver, a productivity tool for the Mac (as am I).

In this video, he demonstrates the "comma trick", which allows you to select a set of files from disparate parts of your system and then perform actions on them.

It's too hard for me to explain; just go watch the video!

Tiger Beta Of Dashcode

Apple has released a beta of Dashcode for OS X 10.4.

Dashcode is one of the new applications in Leopard, that makes it much easier to create dashboard widgets. I'm not a big dashboard user, but maybe building some widgets that I really want will change that.

I only just read about the release, so while I've downloaded it, I have not had a chance to play yet, but it'll be the first thing I do when I get home tonight!

Mac Switcher Guide

Over at Life Hacker, they have a guide for switching from Windows to a Mac.

It talks about all those little things that you're used to doing on your Windows system and how to achieve the same on OS X.

Things like switching between windows, how to completely close an application, rather than just all of its windows, how the file system is structured and how to open a file you have selected in the Finder.

It also has a couple of links to other sources of information for the newly liberated.

MacBreak PathFinder Walkthrough

Over at MacBreak there's a walkthrough of PathFinder, one of my most-used OS X applications.

As it's name suggests, PathFinder is a replacement for the standard Finder. While it costs a few dollars, if you're a Mac user, I'd definitely recommend grabbing a copy.

Automatic For The People

Yesterday, I watched a couple of episodes of the MacBreak video podcast.

While Leo Laporte can be a bit over the top at times, do persevere, because it's the guests who make the show, and the content is definitely interesting.

One I particularly liked was this one on Automator. Up to this point, I'd accepted that Automator was probably a good tool, but have never tried to use it for anything. After watching the video, I'll be giving it a serious workout the next time I have something I want to automate on OS X!

There doesn't seem to be a complete MacBreak archive anywhere that I've been able to track down, but you can find quite a few here.

Specific episodes I'd recommend are these two on Quick Silver, this one that talks about removing distractions from your Mac desktop, and this one on Sketchup and GoogleEarth.

Apple Doesn't Always Get It Right

I've said it before, and I'll say it again ... I love my Macs!

However, my colleague Olivier, who is a recent switcher (from Linux), pointed out a couple of issues the other day.

Here's an article that details 15 things Apple should change in Mac OS X, a number of which echo Oli's annoyances.