The Pool Room

Category: Mac

  • QuickSilver Tips

    I use [QuickSilver](http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/) on my Mac all the time. It’s one of those indispensable applications that I just can’t do without – I really, really miss it on my Windows XP PC at work, but I can’t find any Windows equivalent. There are always new tricks you can learn with QuickSilver. Here are a couple…

  • Discount on iView MediaPro 3

    I use [iView MediaPro 3](http://www.iview-multimedia.com/mediapro/) for managing my digital images, and absolutely love it. These kinds of digital asset management (DAM) tools are great for adding keywords to your photos, searching based upon keywords, editing down to a set of selects after a shoot, creating slide shows, keeping track of offline images (i.e. those stored…

  • Mac Disk Management Utilities

    It doesn’t matter how large your hard disk is, you’ll always run short of space eventually. While trying to free up some space on my PowerBook for a video project, I came across these handy utilities for understanding where all your space has gone and freeing up space that’s wasted: – [Disk Inventory X](http://www.derlien.com/) –…

  • ImageWell and MenuCalendarClock

    I came across another couple of great Mac tools this week. [ImageWell](http://www.xtralean.com/IWOverview.html) is a free, simple image editor. It’s designed for rotating, resizing, cropping, and adding borders or drop shadows to your images quickly and easily. It can even upload them to your website at the click of a button, and will give you the…

  • More Cool Mac Software

    I found a couple of cool OS X applications this week: – [Onyx](http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html) – System configuration, optimisation, maintenance, log file viewing and cleanup, cache and temporary file cleanup, etc. Freeware. – [Sticky Windows](http://www.donelleschi.com/stickywindows/) – Drag any window to the sides or bottom of the screen, and it becomes a tab and the window is hidden.…

  • Quicksilver and iTunes

    I just discovered a cool feature in [Quicksilver](http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/) on the Mac. It has iTunes integration. In Quicksilver’s preferences, click on the iTunes pane. Make sure you’ve selected ‘Show Artwork’, ‘Monitor Recent Tracks’ and ‘Display Track Notifications’. Now, whenever the song changes you’ll get a popup showing you the name of the new song and the…

  • Mac 2GHz Shootout

    Bare Feats have done a [performance comparison](http://www.barefeats.com/pbcd.html) between 5 different 2GHz Macs: – Dual Core G5 Power Mac – iMac Core Duo – MacBook Pro – MacBook Solo (i.e. a Pro with one CPU disabled) – PowerBook G4 (upgraded to 2GHz by a third party) The MacBook Pro really holds itself up well, even compared…

  • On Credibility

    There’s a short period of time where a new switcher to Mac OS X has heightened credibility amongst their Windows- or Linux-using peers. During this period of time, Windows and Linux users will listen to your experiences with OS X with interest. You can draw comparisons and point out differences between the platforms, and they’ll…

  • Mac Photography

    I’m a keen amateur photographer, and occasionally shoot weddings professionally. So if I’m going to switch to OS X I need a good system to download, manage, edit and print my images. I looked around the forums at Photo.net (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3, thread 4, thread 5) to see what programs people are…

  • Switching Strategy

    I don’t want to make the switch to Mac OS X and then discover I’ve made a costly mistake. Here’s how I’m planning to mitigate the risk. The most obvious way to de-risk the switch to OS X is to try it out first. It’s actually surprisingly cheap to do that. After talking to some…