Latest Posts in Mac Gems

PulpMotion creates professional multimedia presentations

Posted by Kris Fong on

5 comments

[Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2009 series. Every day until the end of June 2009, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.]

Apple’s iPhoto slideshow presentations are nice—if you’re not suffering from Ken Burns effect burnout. Keynote gives you more transitions and provides themes that work well for corporate presentations. But if you’re looking to create slideshows that are more engaging, fun, and eye catching, PulpMotion produces professional multimedia presentations that are anything but ordinary.

PulpMotion uses motion themes to add character to slideshows, letting you create a more visually stimulating showcase for your photos and videos. It comes with a bunch of themes, many of which include variations; most are surprisingly useful. You get everything from 3-D transitional effects, museum walkthroughs, and gallery spaces to cinema-style graphic treatments, 3-D animations, and themes for your vacation, holiday, wedding, and other photos. And, of course, the ol’ pan-and-scan standby is in here too. More themes are available from the Aquafadas site.

Shape Collage turns a collection of photos into creative collages

Posted by Kris Fong on

2 comments

You’ve probably made a few photo collages in your lifetime, whether you laid out photos with the perfect amount of messy randomness in a photo album or magnetized a grouping on your fridge. But in the digital world, there’s not a lot out there that lets Mac users do the deed easily. I’ve painstakingly used Photoshop, Pages, and even iWeb to create collages, but nothing compares to the quickness and ease of Shape Collage.

Shape Collage turns a collection of photos into a collage of practically any shape, whether you’re going for a traditional design or something totally out there. The interface is easy to use. You can select one of the preset shapes (a rectangle, heart, or circle) and type some text, or use a custom shape, which you draw within the app or import, to create something unique.

Creating custom-shaped collages in Shape Collage can be fun.

To select images, simply drag and drop photos from the Finder or iPhoto (including Events) into the interface, or have Shape Collage pull images from your Facebook, Flickr, or other Web page. Then select a shape or type text. You can also alter the size, number of photos used, photo spacing, background image, photo border, photo rotation, and shadows. Then click the Preview button to view a randomly generated wire frame of the layout. Once you have a layout you like, click Create to generate the final image as a PNG, JPEG, or even Photoshop (PSD) file for further editing (major brownie points here for the developer).

For traditional collages, the rectangle shape and a handful of photos works best (I like the clean look of selecting None for Rotation under the Advanced tab), but for custom shapes and text creations, you may need more images than you think to give the shape better definition. While I had plenty of vacation photos to make a “Europe” text collage easily comprehensible, a custom “leaf” shape I drew using all 38 of my fall colors pics looked like an elongated blob. To compensate, set a higher number of photos to duplicate images when needed.

While creating custom shapes was quirky good fun, I’m not sure I’d put this app to real use, but for creating more standard collages and photo text, Shape Collage is truly priceless.

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Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Kris Fong is a freelance writer.]

Web2 Delight lets you easily download videos from YouTube

Posted by Aayush Arya on

15 comments

As great as video sharing Web sites like YouTube are, they often don’t allow you to directly download the videos on their site. Web2 Delight doesn’t just make this possible; it makes the whole process positively painless.

To download a photo or video from any of the Web sites listed in Web2 Delight’s sidebar (YouTube, Veoh, blip.tv, Dailymotion, Flickr, Picasa, Webshots, and Photobucket), all you have to do is select the site you want in the sidebar and run a search. Once the video you’re looking for shows up in the viewing pane below, you can roll your mouse over the thumbnails and click the Download button that appears. In the case of YouTube, you can also copy the video URL from your Web browser and paste it into Web2 Delight to have it download the video (although it refuses to download more than one video at once in this manner). All downloaded videos are accessible from within the application itself, and can also be transferred to iTunes (in an iPod-compatible format) at the click of a button.

The saved search feature of Web2 Delight makes it easy to keep track of and download the latest videos being uploaded to video sharing websites like YouTube.

The application features various viewing modes, such as list view, thumbnail view, and Cover Flow (although it seems to have a bug that prevents it from loading the thumbnails in Cover Flow mode). It also allows for saved searches and smart collections, and throws in some rudimentary adult content filtering capabilities for good measure. Also of note is the fact that Web2 Delight lets you download higher quality videos from YouTube whenever they are available.

Although there are a few user interface elements that need to be worked on, Web2 Delight’s overall utility and simplicity make it worth the price.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox. You can also follow MacGems on Twitter.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Aayush Arya is a journalism student from India and regular contributor to Macworld. His online haunts include his blog, Penned Thoughts, and his Twitter feed.]

iLovePhotos uses face detection to sort photos

Posted by Kris Fong on

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Chances are you’ve probably heard about the Faces feature in iPhoto ‘09 () that makes it quick and easy to find all photos of a particular someone in your iPhoto library. But if you don’t have iPhoto ‘09, iLovePhotos can give you a similar result for free, but with more manual effort.

iLovePhotos uses face detection technology to help you organize photos based on the people, places, or things in them. It also plays slide shows and lets you share pics on iLovePhotos.com or Facebook. Just import photos manually or have iLovePhotos sync with your iPhoto library (it doesn’t move or modify the originals); once finished, face detection kicks in, analyzing your collection and marking any faces it finds with a tag box in Photos view.

iLovePhotos uses face recognition to organize your photos.

ViewIt helps sort your camera's photos

Posted by Kris Fong on

5 comments

If you’re a photographer or just plain snapshot-happy, you’ve no doubt experienced the dread of sorting through tons of photos, deciding which to keep or trash. I get this feeling every time I return from a vacation or photo shoot, knowing that I’ll need to go through hundreds of images one ... at ... a ... time ... in Photoshop. But with ViewIt, I can simply drop my camera’s photos onto the ViewIt window, view and mark what’s good with just a key press, and copy only those images to my Mac. Beautiful.

But that’s not all it does. You can also sort images, copy or move photos, e-mail pics, batch convert images to a particular size or file format, print contact sheets, create Web photo galleries, play a slideshow, batch rename files, and more. It does everything you need and then some.

The beauty of ViewIt lies in the simplicity of its one-window interface and button controls for viewing; other features are available through menus. But the best part is that you can control most functions with a key press, making viewing and tagging even easier. Just drop one or more photos, folders of images, or even your iPhoto library onto the window and ViewIt quickly makes them available for viewing, displaying JPEG, TIFF, Raw, PSD, PNG, GIF, and other popular image formats (though I had no such luck with my Nikon NEF files).

One of my favorite things about ViewIt is that it takes very little effort on my part to determine which photos to save or delete. I simply press the spacebar to start a slideshow and then press the M key on the keyboard to mark each photo I want to keep. If I’m not sure about the quality, I press the spacebar again to pause the slideshow, press the + key to zoom in (and the - key to zoom out), mark it or not, and then restart the slideshow. Once all images have played, I then copy all marked images to my hard drive for editing.

My only gripe is that I wish there were a way to designate where contact sheets, Web pages, and converted files get saved, as everything ends up littering my desktop. Still, ViewIt is easy and quick, and eliminates the repetitive strain I often experience when screening photos. I will never go back to my old ways or sorting and sifting photos again.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox. You can also follow MacGems on Twitter.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Kris Fong is a freelance writer.]

Sumo Paint: Photoshop-like Web-based image editor

Posted by Kris Fong on

4 comments

You could pay $700 for a professional image-editing program like Photoshop (), but if you’re not a photo or graphics pro, it would likely be overkill. Check out Sumo Paint, a free Web-based, Photoshop-inspired image editor and creator that offers many similar graphics-editing tools and inspiring paint tools, first.

Let’s say you’ve used Photoshop before but you can’t afford your own copy. You should feel right at home with Sumo Paint, as many of its tools and palettes work like Photoshop’s. A couple of caveats: some tools aren’t available, and some aren’t as in-depth. You can create a new document or open files from your Mac, a Web page, or your Sumo account (you’ll need one to save layered images); the app displays within your Web browser, letting you work and save projects much like you would on your own desktop. Any connection speed and browser that supports at least Flash 9 should work.

For image editing, Sumo Paint offers many Photoshop standbys, including layer support, image adjustment tools (levels, color balance, and so on), blending options, layer effects (such as shadows, glows, and bevels), filters (including distortion effects, sharpening, and blur), a magic wand, and tools to transform and rotate layers, lasso selections, clone sections, draw, paint, add text, and more.

Sumo Paint is a Web-based program with a Photoshop-like interface. And it's free.

Sumo Paint is also a gifted graphics and painting app, packing in some interesting shape tools, cool brushes (the basics, plus fun stuff—like 3-D brushes and animated ones), and a Symmetry feature that makes designing elements easy. Explore the Gravity option for some intriguing effects. There’s also a nifty Curve tool, which works something like a simplified Pen tool, helping you shape rounded objects and corners more easily.

Sumo Paint isn’t perfect: it works only with JPEGs, PNGs, and GIFs and saves only in JPEG or PNG format. I experienced some quirkiness with certain tools and layers, and the Text tool won’t let you edit copy once you lay it down. That said, Sumo Paint is a great free option for fixing photos, designing graphics, and painting, and I’m having a lot of fun with it.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox. You can also follow MacGems on Twitter.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Kris Fong is a freelance writer.]

PhotoPresenter helps make creative slideshows

Posted by Aayush Arya on

4 comments

The advent of advanced color displays brought about a new way to look at images: on-screen slideshows. Rife as Mac OS X already is with slide-show capabilities, PhotoPresenter builds onto those and puts many more options and styles at your fingertips.

PhotoPresenter has a simple iPhoto-like user interface with a sidebar on the left listing all the albums from your iPhoto library and a viewer on the right displaying thumbnails of your images. The rest of the spartan interface is composed of a search field and just a few useful buttons for playing slide shows and adjusting settings. One of the major draws of PhotoPresenter is the flexibility it offers when creating slide shows. You can choose to play entire albums or events, combine photos from different events, and even drag in photos from the Finder.

PhotoPresenter’s plethora of slideshow presentation options makes it much more powerful than the built-in combination of iPhoto, Front Row, and the Finder.

The sheer cornucopia of slide-show styles PhotoPresenter features is stunning. From the simpler dissolve, swipe, and Ken Burns effects that enhance the glamour of your photos to the busier options such as Night City and Flying Through that would serve better as a screen saver, PhotoPresenter has them all. It also allows you to export your slide show as a movie in a variety of resolutions and sizes or as a screen saver (though the screen savers aren't as polished and smooth as you'd expect them to be; the screen savers I created have choppy animation and often skipped frames).

Although this version of PhotoPresenter is limited to images on your Mac, the upcoming version 4.0 will add support for online sources like Flickr and MobileMe Web galleries, along with several interface refinements and new slide-show effects and transitions.

An application dedicated to creating slide shows might not seem like a big deal, but if you've ever enjoyed watching a slide show in iPhoto with your friends and family on a lazy afternoon, you ought to give PhotoPresenter a shot. It just might leave you pleasantly surprised.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Aayush Arya is a journalism student from India and regular contributor to Macworld. His online haunts include his blog, Penned Thoughts, and his Twitter feed.]

Klix recovers deleted photos and movies from memory cards

Posted by Kris Fong on

11 comments

Ever have one of those moments where you download photos to your Mac and then delete the originals, only to find that some didn’t copy over? Rather than curse or cry, just use Klix. Whether you’ve deleted photos, reformatted your media card, or had a card go bad, Klix recovers photos and movie files despite the vacuous state your media card appears to be in.

The software works with practically any USB or FireWire camera or media reader and can recover all popular image and video formats. Just insert the media card into your camera or reader and connect it to your Mac, fire up Klix, click Start, and Klix begins scouring the card for lost photos and displays its findings in the Image Recovery Window.

I shot a couple dozen pics on a 1GB Compact Flash card using two cameras, erased a few images on each, connected one camera to my Mac, deleted the rest of the images, and reformatted the card. I then mounted the card using a media reader to see what Klix could find. For a few minutes, I watched the progress bar creep up without a single photo appearing and got really nervous when it reached the end. But it wasn’t done yet. After another process, images began to pop up.

Klix did an excellent job of recovering deleted photos from a memory card.

First came all the shots I’d just snapped—then came my Christmas photos, my trip to New England from last fall, miscellaneous other snapshots, and even shots from a 2007 European vacation. But it kept going...random JPEGs, TIFFs, Raw files, and QuickTime movies cropped up as far back as five years ago, when I shot a series of images for a camera review. It was a surprising trip down memory card lane—all 385 images worth, though a few were incomplete or blank, which is to be expected. (According to JoeSoft, Klix will not recover pictures on xD memory cards after they've been formatted in an Olympus or Fuji camera.)

When Klix is done, just drag and drop any thumbnail onto your desktop to rescue the file, or select what you want in the window and click Recover. I also unleashed Klix on an old SD card just to see what used to be on it, and experienced the same giddiness as I watched past memories resurface. While I didn’t have any corrupt cards to test, Klix worked amazingly well to recoup everything I thought had been eradicated.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Kris Fong is a freelance writer.]

Photo Wrangler makes it easy to quickly scan through a folder of photos

Posted by Dan Frakes on

5 comments

When I use my digital camera, I tend to take a lot of photos. After all, one of the beauties of going digital is that you don’t have to worry about wasting film on bad shots. When you get home, you just delete the ones you don’t want.

Although you can import all your pictures into iPhoto and then remove the ones you don’t like, I find it easier to do my filtering first. In the past, I used the clever program PhotoReviewer, but that utility didn’t make the transition to Leopard. A good alternative is Photo Wrangler.

Like PhotoReviewer, Photo Wrangler makes it easy to quickly scan through a folder of photos and sort them into separate folders. First you choose your source folder (where the to-be-sorted photos reside). Then you add destination folders; for example, Import and Leave. (Trash is always a destination; you don’t need to create a “Delete” folder.) Finally, you choose whether you want to move photos from the source folder to the destinations or copy the photos, leaving the originals in place.

RooSwitch: Application-based user switching

Posted by Deborah Shadovitz on

1 comment

Think of rooSwitch as an app that lets you perform user switching at the application level. Instead of logging in and out of different user accounts on your Mac, rooSwitch lets you switch users for only one app at a time by switching what rooSwitch calls Profiles. Created for beta users and software developers to create multiple user scenarios, rooSwitch is evolving for use by typical users as well.

For example, I have a group in my Address Book that contains e-mail addresses for mailings. I created a user account to separate the e-mail group from my regular Address Book contacts, and used rooSwitch to switch between the two Address Book accounts. (I must remember to have the proper profile open when I sync my iPhone.) You can use rooSwitch to manage proxy settings in Firefox, or to switch Final Cut Pro setups. You can also use rooSwitch to manage iPhoto libraries but, due to the issues of its large libraries, that gets complicated—iPhoto Library Manager is better designed for that.

To set up a first new Profile for an application, you drag the application’s icon to the rooSwitch window or onto the rooSwitch Dock icon. You then create a Profile, which automatically reflects the current state of that app. Next, to create a new scenario, start a new empty Profile, then click the new profile name and allow the app to quit and re-launch. This presents the app as if you were using it for the first time, so you can set it up for your other situation. Another option is to duplicate your existing Profile and just make changes instead of starting from scratch. To switch Profiles, the rooSwitch window for each managed application must be open, or you can launch its file in Application Support.

RooSwitch works with nearly all programs, supports Automator and AppleScript, and lets you view multiple rooSwitch documents (application controls) simultaneously.

RooSwitch is a powerful application. It can be an excellent tool for developers and beta testers. However, it’s not for novices. If you understand your Mac or work with someone who does, you might create some very helpful workflows with it.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest Gems? Sign up for the Mac Gems newsletter for a weekly e-mail summary of Gems reviews sent directly to your inbox. You can also follow MacGems on Twitter.

Our 186-page Mac Gems Superguide is a veritable greatest hits of Mac Gems. It's available as a PDF download, PDF on CD-ROM, or as a printed book. Learn more about the Mac Gems Superguide.

[Deborah Shadovitz is a Web designer and the author of Adobe GoLive 5 Bible (IDG Books, 2001). She also penned Mac Design’s GoLive column, and was a contributor to SBS Design.]