Bernskiold Media

Cha-Ching

Keeping control over your money and where it goes can be a daunting progress. It is here that Cha-Ching (hear the cash register sound when you read the application name?) aim to help you. Cha-Ching is a personal financial manager application that allows you to track where your money goes and to whom. You can set up as many different accounts as you want and set up the starting balance for them and get going with the managing.

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Scrivener – The Professional Writing Application

 Scrivener is a writing application for the Mac that is based on the workflow of a professional writer. It is by no means meant to be an output writer like Apple Pages or Microsoft Word is and thus you cannot really do much do your text and images apart from the usual italics, bold and underlining. It is however, amazing at what it does, allowing you to write faster and more organized.

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Evernote – Keeping your notes in sync!

Evernote is one little amazing service that all revolves around note-keeping. It is available for a plethora of devices and operating systems like Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile and the iPhone. Let me tell you why I love Evernote that much!

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Coda – The Premiere Coding App for the Mac

Where should I begin? Coda by Panic Software is one of the best coding applications ever created! It’s available for the Mac platform only and really does what you’d imagine.

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ScreenFlow – Screen Recording at its best!

ScreenFlow is an application that lets you record your screen complete with your own audio narration as well as video from your camera and computer audio if you so wish.

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Layers – Screenshot Application

Layers is perhaps the first application that I’ve ever come across that’ll let you take screenshots as layered Photoshop files, but it really is superb. More times than I can could have I wanted to take a screenshot of a window with only some icons in my menu bar in the shot, or without all those windows covering up the background. Well, guess what, instead of closing all of these things down, you can now use Layers to get there.

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VueScan

 VueScan is leading scanner software that allows you to do powerful scans from just about any scanner on the market even a lot of older scanners. The test was done with an older Agfa SnapScan 1212u on a MacBook.

VueScan is extremely easy to use. Just start it up and make sure your scanner is plugged in and you can start scanning straight on. There is no need to be afraid of the need to find drivers because with VueScan they weren’t needed. I was very impressed with that because I was using an older scanner I knew I didn’t have the drivers and certainly not for the Mac that I now have.

After starting up VueScan on your computer, you are greeted with the first screen that allows you to control some basic options in a tab layout for the different sections; Input, Crop, Filter, Color, Output and Preferences. If you want to get greater control over the input settings you can hit a button that says “More” at the bottom and you will get full options that will allow you to fine-tune your scan into the outmost detail.

How easy is it to use?
As said, VueScan is extremely easy to use and don’t require any real knowledge of scanning or settings to be able to use it to scan, so that means that just about anyone can use it to get high-quality scans.

For the advanced scanner or professional that requires a lot of options and fine-tuning options, this program will allow you to do just that, everything from the type of media you are scanning with the DPI to the output and it can also do OCR scanning so that you can get your text documents to editable text on the fly.

Interface
The user interface is extremely simple, putting the options and the scanning in the focus. It consists of a small sidebar on the left where all the options are and a big area to the right where your scan and preview will appear. The simplistic interface works really well in this program and it makes it really easy to scan using it.

Scan Quality
Using VueScan it is very easy to scan booth images and photographs and text as well as magazines at a very high quality. They all come out as clear scans without loosing any punch from the original image.
You can chose the DPI which the scanner scans in from the settings as well as a number of mentioned settings in a tab menu where each section has booth the simple settings as well as the advanced, pro, settings. So whether you scan text or photos you are going to be happy with the scans you get.

Options
You have a number of set media types; Color Photo, B/W photo, Line Art, Text, Magazine and Newspaper. The last two are optimized for their certain types of media. You also have greater control over the color settings, crop, input and output settings.

For the output; VueScan can handle outputting the document straight to the printer or scan to file (and some other options as well). When scanning to a file you have a lot of output controls on how and where the document will be created. You can scan to tiff, jpeg, pdf, ocr and raw files, depending on the need with further options available when selecting the file format you want to save in. You can also save in multiple formats at the same time.

Verdict
I was really impressed with VueScan and how easy it was to use even the first time you were using it seeing as I just plugged in my scanner and it just worked when I started the programs. It works really well, producing nice scans at the basic settings without adjusting too much and at the same time it gives advanced scanners enough options for their needs. All in all, VueScan is a great scanner software that I now grown to love over all the other ones I’ve used before that didn’t satisfy me in the way you used them. VueScan I think has done it all right!

Twitterific

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I’m a pretty new user of Twitter and like most users of Twitter, I don’t like the need to go onto their website to see my subscribed tweets or to post new tweets. This is where this application comes in. Twitterific allows you to manage your entire twittering from your computer easily and simply. The interface is quite slick and it works as a kind of mini widget on your computer, stored either in the menu bar or in the dock (or both) depending on your preference. The interface is one of the things that I really like because it does make it simple and easy for me to view the tweets as they come, and easy to reply and post my own. If you have Growl installed then you’ll get even better notifications when you have new tweets to read.

The price is pretty fair. You can use it for free only you need to see ads all every hour which isn’t that big of a deal. If you don’t want to though, or if you want to support the Iconfactory people, you can buy the application for $14.95.

All in all the application is really a must have for any mac user active on Twitter. It makes it all a lot easier on there with it.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

So after using the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard for about one week now I feel I’ve gotten into most of the features that is new and that you may use everyday which I’ll start off by saying, is not near all the 300 new features, examples include the fact that there is a lot of features that are to do with improved functioning or networking such things I do not use more in-depth in my day to day work on my computer.

I’m basing this review on the functionality of the 10.5.0 release of Leopard since that is what I have running under a MacBook 2.0 GHz 80gb HDD, 1gb RAM with a LaCie 250gb external drive and it is from that I base on how smooth things are running. 

My Favorite New Features

There are a lot of the new features that I absolutely just love and adore many of them are small but some of them are large as well. I’m really happy that the iCal dock icon is now showing the correct date even when turned off which I found absolutely great, since I don’t have my iCal on all the time (memory consuming) but only when I need it. Of course I cannot skip the larger features, which I’ve fallen in love with!

QuickLook
I love QuickLook it is just one of these amazing new features that makes your file browsing inside of finder so much easier! It works on almost all file types I have, including .psd files from Adobe Photoshop. Of course normal image files like jpeg files are supported as well as PDF, word and excel document and more. It is just one of those features I’m now using all the time and makes a real difference for me when previewing files, especially pdf’s.

Spaces
Yes, spaces are really awesome and it makes a real difference when you are on a smaller laptop screen like on my MacBook without my external one. It is very useful being able to group your windows into different spaces and it really makes you feel that you have a much larger desktop. Now I have a feature request regarding spaces and that is mainly that you can choose to only activate spaces on one monitor if you have two plugged in. So that you can have a permanent window on one screen like a browser and then have spaces activated on the other screen. That’s no big loss but it would be handy although as I said in the beginning, I find spaces the most awesome when I’m on a small screen and need to have a cleaner work area to use or be more organized (which I am, an organized person).

Mail
I really like the new mail as well especially the idea of the built in RSS reader. I am subscribed to a fair bit of RSS feeds and I’ve previously needed to use an external application for reading them and of course that means more memory usage. That means I’m very much in love with the fact that Mail can now read RSS feeds. The notes and to-dos are also great and I’m going to really like Stationery and the ability to create my own mail templates as well. Another mail feature that I haven’t had much use for yet is the date and time auto detector so you can put in a meeting or event directly from a mail into iCal!

Stacks
I’m fully and totally in love with stacks. They just make putting files in the dock easier. Okay, I will admit that I miss the hierarchical browsing that you could do with a right click before but I really like the way stacks work. However it would be great to be able to control how big the grid mode stack would be, because when I open my applications stack, I’d rather it take up as much screen space as it could so I can see all my applications. Alternatively I could get a setting to choose how large my thumbnails should be. Of course as many others are wishing, the ability to control the preview icon that appears in the dock because it may be great in picture stacks, but when I have my applications in a stack, I’d rather not need to have the Address Book icon (which is my first application in the list) to be my preview icon for that stack nor do I like to put an empty folder at the top of my applications folder just to get it to show a normal icon in the dock (which is what I’m doing now). Stacks are a great and I like them, but those little things would make it more perfect!

My Not So Favorite Features

Of course I have a list of new features and changes that I don’t like as much at all and they all could mostly be controlled and fixed by a setting or two actually.

Translucent Menu Bar

My main concern is the translucent menu bar in the top. Sure it may look quite nice but it is absolutely a pain to read and you quickly notice why they decided to change their default desktop background in the videos etc. to the dark “aurora” instead of the grass. It is very hard to read text on a colorful background and the current hack to solve it is to open the background image in Photoshop (or similar) and then make a white or black bar up in the top where the menu bar is, to either get a white or grey solid menu bar. This could have easily been made to our preferences by a simple setting in the System Preferences panel under Appearance although it has not been made which is not as nice, so at the moment, it is into Photoshop with the backgrounds or just pick general dark backgrounds…

Open Application in Dock
I’m very bugged by the open application icon in the dock. In Tiger you had a little back arrow under the program icons that were opened and it was a clear way of seeing what programs you had open. Now in Leopard, Apple has replaced the black arrow with a blue, glowing dot. While I like the new dock, this is hard to see, especially if you have a window edge close to the dock and it is reflecting into it and especially with colorful backgrounds. I’m hoping that a third party application (or better yet official fix) comes out in near future that will allow you to change the color on that little dot.

What do not work under Leopard? How was the upgrade?

Out of all my programs, drivers and devices, I’m quite surprised that there are more things that do not work. Since I come from the background of upgrading the windows OS’s q few times, the policy for me have always been, a) wait until the first service pack, and b) wait until all programs come out with an upgrade for the new OS, which in the latter case usually takes about the time for Microsoft to come out with service pack one.

Now in this case the upgrade went very smooth using the Archive and Install option as well as having a complete hard drive backup on my external drive to rely on I am experiencing no problems with Leopard itself or any of my programs really. That is of course except the confirmed bugs in Lightroom and the other Creative Suite Applications that is announced by Adobe as needing upgrades to work properly (Acrobat 8 Professional, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Soundbooth, Encore). I’m also surprised to see that many of the applications I use were upgraded even before Leopard was released and that has made me really happy! As far as devices and drivers go, I have had to reinstall most of the drivers but that is not a major concern since I had expected that and besides, after the re-install of the drivers, all of my devices work like a charm (Mouse, Tablet, Printer etc.).

Time Machine

Time Machine is also one of my favorite new features, but since it is so big I thought it deserved a completely dedicated section! I have a partition on my external drive just for Time Machine where it backs my internal hard drive up according to the update scheme. Now I’m not the one that usually looses files and need to go back and find them, but I feel much better knowing that my computer has a backup and is backed up so that I don’t loose any important client files if something would happen.

You might want to know however, that if you are thinking about backing up to a network disk, connected through a router, that this is not supported by Time Machine simply because it hogs up your entire network connection leaving you unable to do much other things, as well as eats up your bandwidth. This means that you’ll need to have an external drive connected to your computer (or partition an internal drive which is not that recommended since it quite looses the point on a backup outside your computer) the whole time which could be troublesome on laptops.

So for my own example, as long as my external drive is hooked up to my computer, it is taking backups but as soon as I disconnect or go and work someplace other than on my main workspace where I don’t have the external drive connected, Time Machine will not back up my files that I have on the computer which can be a bit troublesome indeed but for me, it works pretty well, since I don’t usually work much away from my external drive due to the size of my internal hard drive.

So in the end, Time Machine is an awesome new feature in Leopard that would be worth the price of the upgrade alone!

Some Final Thoughts

So as you may have realized by now, I’m digging Leopard a lot and I like most of the new features and I can live with the ones I dislike a bit since we are not talking about a real hate. Overall, my experience these two weeks have been very smooth and nice without any hiccoughs at all, programs playing up, data loss or anything. It runs like a charm even on my 1gig RAM laptop if not a bit faster than Tiger even.

I can only recommend this upgrade and I don’t see any speed bumps either even on low RAM memory as long as you take the correct preparations before you upgrade it can’t go that wrong when you do upgrade. Having a complete hard drive backup (using a program like SuperDuper!) is very recommended and I wouldn’t be doing an upgrade without it. Also checking that the programs you need every day is working under Leopard is a good thing!

Billings 3

When you are a web designer or graphics artist in need of tracking your time, there are several solutions available. I’ve been using this application for the Mac called Billings from Marketcircle for some time and I’ve taken a liking to it.

Billings 3 is an application that let’s you track the time you’ve been working on a project and then later bill the client for it. You’ve got a lot of functionality in there. You start by importing clients from your address book, which will make them show up in the main billings window. You can then add projects to the clients and in each project you can add both estimate slips (to make up an estimate) and then go on to working slips. It’s a really powerful system that’s still easy and fast to use.

When you have an active slip open, you’re going to see a time indicator in the finderbar.  This lets you quickly pause and resume the work on the active slip and it also helps you to see how much time you’ve spent on the project.

When you’ve completed work on a project you can select one or multiple working slips and create an invoice out of those. The Billings engine has many great invoice (and estimate) templates built in, but also a template editor if you wish to create your own template. When you’ve created the invoice, it’s moved into the Accounts section, where you can see all invoices and receipts the clients have, in chronological order. You can also quickly see the current balance.

There are of course a lot of different reports available as well in the reports module allowing you to print out valuable reports in an easy way. You can also print labels and envelopes if you wish.

I’ve been using Billings for quite a while now and I really think it is a good application that makes it simple and easy to track time and send out invoices to clients. While it’s mostly great, there is a thing that I’d really truly like to see in the application. That thing is multiple currency support. The way it is now, it’s using your computers default currency, only. If you wish to print out invoices in another currency, you need to modify the templates and hardcode in the other currency symbol, which will in the end make a mess in the reports that will never show it right. I wish this would be added really soon!

Billings 3 is created by Marketcircle and available at their site for $59.