Geven's 1st Birthday Party
Uncategorized November 17th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Geven's 1st Cake
Uncategorized November 16th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Pulling grandma
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Tags: ma
NameChanger – batch renaming made easy on OS X
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Filed under: Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity
A lot of digital cameras are great for taking photos, but pretty shoddy for naming files. Sure, it’s alright to have them listed by date and time — at least that keeps them in order — but we think it’s a lot nicer to rename a batch of photos so you remember what they’re actually of. That’s where NameChanger comes in. It’s a lightweight renaming app for OS X, with a focus on images.
NameChanger can append, prepend, replace, or rename all kinds of files with whatever input you give it, but it really shines when it comes to pictures. Drag a batch into the image browser, switch to sequence mode, and “DCP_16739″ becomes “Hawaii01,” or whatever you want it to be. Let NameChanger keep the numbers straight for you. And, at a tiny 1.9mb, you probably have pictures that take up more disk space than this useful little app.
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ICONlook: icon search engine
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Filed under: Design, Productivity, Search
When it comes to tracking down some icons for a project — nothing real fancy, and preferably under some kind of open license — image searching on Google doesn’t always do the trick. ICONLook is a search site that you can try instead: it’s specifically for icons, and it has some useful features that make it worth a peek if you’re in a pinch. These are generally OS-type icons, for stuff like apps, documents and search buttons, so don’t get your hopes up for anything too fanciful. Heck, we couldn’t even find anything as wild and crazy as a cat icon on ICONLook.
Selection is not ICONLook’s strong point. Even within the categories it’s designed for, there’s not a lot of variety. On the plus side, many of the icons are available in a number of different sizes, and there are links to the source and the license for each one. This puts to rest any worries that this might be some kind of hack job, or the work of nefarious icon pirates. Instead, what you get is a legitimate, middle of the road selection of licensed icons that will hopefully expand to become more useful.
UPDATE: An astute reader was able to find a cat on ICONLook. We stand corrected, but we still feel the site could use a bigger library. Thanks, Jeff_RE!
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Silverback brings advanced usability testing to the Mac
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Filed under: Design, Developer, Utilities, Video, Beta
Silverback, a new OS X application from the renowned UK-based design team Clearleft, was a mystery for quite a while. The app had a site with some neat visual tricks and a gorilla with a clipboard, and it said the application was for designers, but what did it do? The suspense was killing us! We finally had a chance to test Silverback this week, and if you design websites or application interfaces, this program is worth the wait.Silverback basically turns your Mac into a full-featured usability testing station. Add a new project, add some users, and have them come sit down and test out your interface. Silverback hangs out unobtrusively in the background, capturing video of the the entire screen, including a cute (and useful) effect that marks where your tester is clicking. This in itself would be handy, but Silverback also takes advantage of your built-in iSight camera to include a picture-in-picture of the tester’s reactions, on top of the screen capture.
This way, you can see everything the user is doing in real time, and they can speak comments aloud as they come up, rather than pausing to write them down. Usability testing the old-fashioned way generally involves expensive setups and lots of instructions, but Silverback is intuitive to use and provides straightforward and informative results. Silverback is currently in private beta, so some testers can test its testing functions (this makes our heads hurt a little bit.)
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NEAT Receipts for Mac Advance Release
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Filed under: Accessories, Hardware, Peripherals, Software
Hey, slacker! You know who you are – the person who waited until 11:59 PM on April 15th to file your tax return. You’ve decided to get organized so you can file on April 14th next year. Windows users have had a leg up in the expense organizing world with a best-selling scanner/software combo called NEAT Receipts. Now Mac users are getting the love too.
Consisting of a sleek little scanner and some proprietary software, NEAT Receipts for Mac Advance Release is a complete solution for capturing all of life’s little expenses automatically. You scan a receipt, and OCR software captures the vendor, price, sales tax, and other data into a library along with an image of the receipt.
NEAT Receipts for Mac Advance Release doesn’t have all of the features of the PC version yet, but it will when the final version is released in January, 2009. For the time being, you can buy the scanner and software for $179.95 (a full $50 less than the PC version) and upgrade to the full Mac version for free when it ships.
Thanks to Rachel for the tip!
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Buell Ulysses Police XB12XP
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Name Mangler: batch rename your files
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Filed under: Software, Universal Binary, Leopard
Most people rarely ever have to rename a whole lot of files at once. Let’s face it — batch file renaming isn’t UNIX kernel reprogramming, but it’s one of those irritating tasks that can be a surprising amount of trouble for casual or even more experienced users without the right tools. As a web designer and developer, I find myself having to numerically rename images a lot or add “_tb” suffixes for thumbnails, for example.
Luckily for Leopard users, there’s Name Mangler 2.0, a donationware app by Mac developer Many Tricks that does all the stuff you might need a batch file renamer to do: change case or extension, prefix or suffix a file name, remove characters, the works. You can even store renaming configurations as droplets that you can drop files or folders on to.
Unfortunately, Name Mangler is Leopard-only. Many Tricks has an earlier app, File List (direct download link), that apparently does the same thing for pre-Leopard systems; another alternative app is File Wrangler, which resides on my 10.4.9-running MacBook Pro quite happily, or the venerable and powerful A Better Finder Rename.
[via Lifehacker]
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Tags: cli, email, Google, IO, Leopard, ma, Mac, man, Remove, XP
A Vista theme for iPhone? Yes, really
Uncategorized October 26th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Does this logo look familiar?
(Credit: ModMyiFone)
The latest third-party iPhone app to draw blogosphere buzz this morning is most definitely not Apple-approved.
The object of hilarity and defamation is VistaPerfection 2.0, a theme by developer Spec-Works that plops the Windows Vista GUI onto the iPhone. To run it, …
