TaoSpace

Software galore!

Oliver commented today that I seem to be good at finding cool software for the Mac. To make sure other people discover these gems, here is a list of some of the more interesting ones. Some are relatively new, otherwise have been around for a while but deserve another turn in the spotlight:

• xPad: A very simple but effective notepad/text-editor tool. Auto-saves everything, so you content is always safe. Allows you to file your documents in categories using a side-panel. Very useful and doesn't overflow with useless features. Shame SubEthaEdit (my favourite editor) doesn't have some of this functionality.
• ViewIt: A very slick and very fast image-viewer. Has a ton of features without appearing bloated. Can operate in full-screen mode (not just for slideshows, but for everything) and has a UI that tries really hard to stay out of your way. Another cool feature is a slider-driven filmstrip to rapidly flick through loads of images and it also has the ability to copy/move images to predefined destination making it useful for sorting out and culling images from your digicam for instance!
• Spike: Rendez-vous enabled clipboard tool. Basically allows you to see and copy stuff from the clipboard of anyone on the network. Provided they are also using Spike of course. Even works for images! Can keep a full history of clips for later re-use, comes in Mac and PC versions, is encrypted and can be password protected. Very, very, handy when working in groups. Copy and paste eachother code-snippets, send URLs around in a snap etc. etc.
• FileChute: Archives (zip, tar or dmg) all files you drop on it, directly FTPs (or .Macs, or WebDAVs) it to place you set up and puts a URL for it on your clipboard. If you have ever been annoyed about sending large files to someone (email doesn't work for instance) then this will help a lot. Sure you could zip stuff up and FTP it manually but this is much more convenient. It generate SnipURLs for you if dislike long URLs and has various privacy options too (passwords, random filenames etc.)
• MenuCalendarClock: Puts pull down calendar in your menubar, including any iCal appointments you might have. Includes weeknumbers (which some people weirdly seem to insist on using in communications) and allows you to thumb through each month quickly. Handy for fast planning.
• WhatSize: Calculate the size of every folder on your hard-drive and allows you to navigate through them sorted by size. If you have ever wondered where all your diskspace went, this tool will provide the answer.

OK, that should tide you over for a while...

Software Review Day: World of Warcraft

After the two "serious" applications it is time for a game. World of Warcraft is currently in open beta and will remain so for at least a couple of more days. Looking around on the web, one can see that this game has been eagerly awaited by hordes of fans of "The Warcraft Universe". For the record: I am not one of them. I've never played any of the Warcraft games and the only reason I picked up this one is because I was bored and looking for something to play.

So how does it play? It a word: amazingly!

The fact I like it is very strange indeed, since fantasy doesn't interest me and "The Warcraft Universe", whatever it is, therefore even less. It is testament to the game solid design and mechanics that I didn't end up playing it for an hour or so and then deinstalling it. Instead, it is has me hooked.

Since the game's scope is so large, I'll just name a few things I particularly liked:

• Amazing environments. It is not so much that the graphics are the best ever (they are not bad, but certainly nothing like Ryzom), but the design itself. Loads of attention to details, fluid transitions between one type of scenery to the next, and the sheer size of the world. If you're an elf and you visit the city of Darnassus, you can help but be impressed by the towering structures and the tall ent-like guardians for instance. The whole place is very imaginative and because there is hardly any loading going on the suspension of disbelief is almost total.
  
• Great quest system. From the moment you get into the game characters give you quests. As opposed to some other online games, these are actually fun. Sure enough a chunk of them are of the "go there and there and kill stuff", but there are many that involve sneaking around, discovering new lands, even diving for treasure. A lot of care has been put into making each quest feel unique and part of some larger story. Even better than that is the fact that all the quests together more or less come to make an ever expanding tour of the world. First you are sent around the starter-area, then you get a quest to deliver something to the next city down the road, from there you are sent to check out an invasion of kind of creatures in yet another place etc. etc. I found that this is structured so well, especially in the beginning, that the kind of challenge the next quest presents, will be a good match for your character's abilities at the time you are given it. All in all, a lot of fun!
  
• Travel. Besides going on foot you can take a hippogryph ride (yes like Harry Potter, only more sinister) or a ferry to go from place to place. Instead of being some kind of "teleportation" devices, these things actually work as you would expect. You see yourself flying across the lands, or sailing on board of a ship. On the ferry you can even walk around, as well as talk and trade with the other players on board. The water isn't just an infinite expanse of nothing either. There tons of creatures in it, swimming around sunken ships, carcasses of giant sea-creatures long-dead and debris. You can even learn to fish and gather food (used to improve your health with) that way.
  
• Crafting. In a lot of games crafting (i.e. creating items) requires a special class of character. The same goes for "healing" classes. No so in WoW. First aid, leatherworking, mining, etc. are skills any character can learn "on the side". Anyone can become a first class cook (prepared food regenerates more health faster) next to being a kick-ass scout or druid or whatever. Fishing and some other abilities can even be learned next to crafting.
  
• Skills. Next to the range of abilities, spells, recipes and items, there are also skill points. You gets these for each level after 10. These allow you to fine-tune and improve your existing abilities. All this makes for tons of things to do and try, much like Anarchy Online's myriad options for character advancement.
  

There is tons more I could say, but I'll just close of with three things:
Firstly, the game isn't perfect. It does crash every now and again and sometimes won't work again until after a reboot. Like any online game it also suffers from some lag. I have not noticed this too much, but other people seem to have huge issues with it. Both suck, but so far it hasn't taken away my enjoyment of the game.

Secondly, there is a Mac version available! This is quite rare, if not almost unique in the online gaming world.

Third and lastly, I haven't enjoyed a MMORPG this much since I play Anarchy Online.

So go ahead and give it go while you still can. Get a character and build it up to at least 10 or so and then pass judgement. My first few hours with the game did have some frustrations (you talk to the various chat channels by their number, i.e. /1, /2 etc., this took me forever to find out) but when the whole thing "opened up" I couldn't put it down anymore.

Software Review Day: FotoStation Classic

FotoStation Classic is the first edition of FotoStation for the Mac. Having tried FotoStation for Windows extensively a while ago, I was anxious to see the Mac version appear. For the longest time Fotoware said nothing about the Mac version. At one point the release date for it was even removed from the website. Then when the releasedate it, it was just turned into an "announcement date", i.e. they announced that the Mac version would arrive. That was a stupid, as they had already announced this months before. In any case, now it is here in the "classic" version.

The main difference with the regular "Pro" version, as available for Windows, seems to be the lack of image-editing features. Unfortunately this is one part of the Windows version the really shines. It has features like "digital flash" and advanced color correction (almost) on-par with Photoshop. All of those are missing in action here and that's a crying shame.

There are still plenty of good points though, such as dynamically resizing thumbnails grids, a classification view (to sort out images in approved/rejected sets or multiple categories) and a customizable meta-data editor. Almost everything can be customized to the n-th degree. Case in point are the flexible "actions" you can define. These can be a string of operations applied to an image, such as cropping it, down-scaling it, applying a specific color-profile and then sending it somewhere using FTP. Very nice indeed.

Speed-wise the application is very much a mixed bag though. Most of its operations grind my (admittedly aging PB G4) to a halt. Sometimes things like flipping through images and zooming in and out is fast, other times to spinning ball pops up and stays there for quite a bit longer that I would have liked. This is worse then it may sound, because you never quite know what to expect. Loads of buttons do not seem to "do" anything initially, but after 20 seconds all of sudden something does happen. By that time you have already given up on it, or maybe even clicked the button 10 times (aaaargh!).

All in all the Windows version feels much snappier. In fact that was the thing that attracted me to the app in the first place.

Other gripes include the multitude of ways you can organize and browse your collection of photos: "archives" and "archive groups", "projects", "jobs", or just browsing the filesystem. All very flexible but not really making things any easier. For example: the "acquire" functionality. To put images in to the system you need to acquire them (unless you just want to browse them). This is tied to the "job" functionality. Just inputting a bunch of images from somewhere therefore has to become a five step process. All very nice and flexible and easy to integrate into your professional photodesk workflow. That is if "you" are working for a major newspaper. For everyone else it just seems gratuitous.

Finally I could find no easy way of updating the IPTC tags inside the photo. You can edit the information, but no data is written back to files (checked with a hex-dump of the files). My guess is these are written out when you export files (i.e. you probably need to define an action for it). It might also be that this is "Pro" functionality. Batch edits of files take a long time to process. This would be explainable if it were to write the IPTC to files, but since it doesn't it is just silly. This alone makes the app unusable for my purposes.

Much of the above (apart from the poor performance) can be explained in light of the original intended audience though. FotoStation is meant to integrate with other systems in a large environment. Although it seems the "Classic" marchitecture is geared to smaller usage scenarios, it still has way too much "baggage" to make it as usable as some of the competition.

Now for the tenuous stuff: FotoStation doesn't publish any prices, you have to contact their resellers directly. I have however read somewhere that the "Pro" version sells for several hundreds of euros.
If the price for "Classic" is also in that range it would be quite steep. From some of the forums around the web it also becomes clear that the whole thing, although a complete rewrite, is quite up to the level of its predecessor (FotoStation 4.5).

Having been a product manager for a web-based DAM system for quite some time, I can say that there are better mechanisms to do some of things FotoStation does. All in all the few nice touches it has don't weigh up to the problem, at least for me. I would recommend iView MediaPro over FotoStation for the time being.

Software Review day: StickyBrain 3

Today I hope to post several short software reviews, beginning with something I found only a few days ago: StickyBrain. Basically this is a do-it-all note-taking application. Similar in concept to Notebook or NoteTake, but quite different in execution.

Where NoteBook and NoteTake take the spiral-bound-notebook-with-tabs approach, Stickybrain uses simpler two-pane approach. The top pane contains a list of notes and the bottom the note in question. Notes can be filed to specific categories (using a sidebar) and can include special features like checkboxes (for todo lists) and links between notes, as well as between notes and addressbook entries.
It also does alarms and allows you to email notes.

Having tried both NoteTake and NoteBook I must say StickyBrains more straight-forward approach works better. With the other two I constantly had the feeling the notebook metaphore got in the way. Granted the others are more like outlining applications which does give features not present in StickyBrain. However, what it all boils down to is recording information quickly and making it easily retrievable. This is where StickyBrain shines.

It's back-end is OpenBase, which (apparently) is a full featured embedded database. It is able to do type-ahead find ala iTunes across all your notes and even comes with a menu-bar gizmo, called FlashNote, that allows you to do that without StickyBrain even being open. Too bad the interface for that one if butt-ugly and differs greatly from the main interface (wood with metal trimmings, YUCK!).
There are also Cocoa services that allow you to "grab" info from applications and create a note of it.

All in all it is a sweet little application. Whether I will continue to use it after the trial expires I do not know though. Time will tell if it will start to grow on me. The major caveat for the long run seems to be that, for the things I would like to do with it, Tiger's Spotlight will largely do the same.

Still it is well worth checking out!

Monty Arafat

OK, its a serious situation, but Airbag's play on the Arafat affair is hilarious none the less.

Hopkin Green Frog

Scot posted about Hopkin Green Frog. This stuff is hilarious! Could this be another "all your base..." in the making?

OK, it is still sad for the little boy that lost the frog in the first place. I am however sure that, with all this attention, the frog will found soon!

Samba and keychain

Just installed MacOS X 10.3.6 without any issues. However, one of the supposed features is that SMB shares should work better. Ever since I started using MacOS X (during the 10.1 days) I have had problems saving the login details to the keychain. It saves them just fine (can be verified in the keychain application) but doesn't appear to try and use them at all, when logging into a previously saved server/share. 10.3.6 didn't change anything here.

Is anyone actually able to get this to work at all(i.e. to connect without having to key in all your login details again)?

There are no words...

This is terrible and very scary: Theo van Gogh murdered.