Episode 48 / July 11, 2007
Leo Laporte starts us off with Nisus Writer Pro, the long-awaited alternative to Microsoft Word. The app has Perl macros, searching by attribute, and lots of other powerful features. It reads and writes Word format, so compatibility is assured.
Very special guest The Macelope plugs Aurora, a fantastic app that I myself often depend on. Basically it’s a little alarm clock app. It has a tasteful menubar icon that gives you easy access to it. Click on it and you can set as many alarms as you’d like. You can choose any iTunes playlist to play when the alarm goes off. You can have it slowly raise the volume over a user-definable time period (which is great for waking you up without startling you) and it haas a snooze button as well. Best of all, it will wake up your computer from sleep when it’s time to sound an alarm. Amazingly, this thing’s free!
Merlin Mann’s pick is Flygesture from Gus Mueller’s Flying Meat Software. Basically it allows you to use mouse gestures to make your Mac do different things. It’s kind of like triggers on Quicksilver but without touching the keyboard. Want to close the current window? Move your mouse right then diagonally (or anything other gesture you choose). It’s sort of a difficult thing to explain and is best understood by trying it out. And, again, this one’s also free!
With a bit of a techie pick is Andy Inhatko who recommends Photomatix. It’s a high dynamic range photography tool. The technique helps with poor lighting by allowing you to take many pictures of the same subject at different exposures and then combine them all into one photo using the best parts of each differently lit photo you took. Make sense? No? Call Andy. Photomatix does the heavy lifting for you and takes the different crappy pics you took and spits out one amazing one. Check out the flickr “hdr” tag for some pretty cool examples. Sadly, this one’s not free, though it is free to try.
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