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People want to be able to do cool stuff with their computers. It’s why they bought them in the first place, right? The promise of power, being bestowed with abilities that up to now you didn’t possess.
One category of apps that has long been ruled by high-end software is graphic creation. There’s no doubting the utility of these apps for the professional, but both their toolkit and their price tag are overkill for the average consumer.
Developers have spied an opening here, and Mapdiva have created an interesting app called Artboard. It’s directly aimed at the average consumer who’s looking to create vector-based graphics.
But while the marketing message and pedestrian price tag of $19.99 appeal to the consumer, does Artboard fulfill on their promise of “Simple. Powerful. Fun.”? What does Artboard have to offer? And while we’re at it, how does it stack up to its high-end competition?
Let me be frank. Full, up-front disclosure: I’m not a graphic designer or a photographer. I know very little–all things considered–about light, exposure, hue, saturation and filters and all of those other things that prolific users of Photoshop concern themselves with.
What’s interesting is that it ended up seeming as though it were these precise qualities (or lack there of) that made my reviewing Imagerie rather fitting. App4Mac set out design an image editor for every day use–for people without the expertise needed for professional grade image editing software. For people like me.
But is Imagerie the tool for the lay-persons image editing needs?
People love photos. We love taking them, editing them, and most of all we love sharing them with our friends and family. From Facebook albums and email attachments to online services like Kodak galleries and Shutterfly, the options seem limitless for how we get our pictures into the hands of our loved ones. But it’s easy to get tired of sending email attachments or signing up for new sharing services.
Posterino from Zykloid software makes the act of photo sharing fun, engaging, and creative again with its easy-to-use interface and plethora of creative options. Read on past the break to find out more and give your old photos new life.
Pro photographers know the drill: plug in digital camera, import to Lightroom/Aperture, spend hours getting that image to look just right, and the results speak for themselves.
However, if you’re an amateur photographer, hobbyist, scrapbooker or just trying to make use of the camera you got for Christmas, you might find yourself less than satisfied with this complex and often time-consuming routine.
With an intuitive interface, powerful features, and speedy performance, Flare promises to give you great looking results without breaking the bank (or your sanity). Let’s take a look and see how it stacks up!
We make slideshow presentations for all kinds of occasions, and it’s often important for them to look smart and professional – be it to keep an audience interested or to present something to a client. Coupled with the Mac, iPhoto and iMovie both offer slideshow functionality, but both are pretty limited in what they can do.
If you find yourself needing to make slideshows fairly regularly, FotoMagico from Boinx Software may be of interest. FotoMagico is a very intuitive and professional application, perfect for putting together great looking slideshows with photos, video and audio.
I’ll be reviewing the Pro version of FotoMagico, but the standard version is much the same with some features removed. Read on to see what FotoMagico can do for you.
Are you a designer, developer, photographer, or just a colour lover in general? Have you ever wished there was an easy way to save any colour of your screen, and then copy that colours hex or rgb colour code? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you’re in luck, because that’s exactly what Swatch does.
Swatch is a lightweight colour picker that sits as a paint-brush icon in your Mac’s menu-bar. So what makes Swatch better than all the other colour pickers? Read on to discover how Swatch can work for you, and also find out about a few similar utilities available for OS X!
iPhoto is a great application for storing your photos. But as your library gets bigger and bigger, it can all turn into a bit of a mess and make locating that photo you’re after more of a mission than it should be. Shoebox from KavaSoft is a photo organization app which sorts your pictures by content based on tags and categories.
For those of you who feel like you are growing out of iPhoto, Shoebox might be just the solution. In this review I’ll take a look at how it compares to iPhoto, what it has going for it and what it doesn’t.
Perhaps you have more than one Mac in your life. I know several people that have an iMac in their house, a work machine, and also their own Macbook for travelling around. If that’s the case, then it can be hard to avoid a “media mess” spread all over your different machines. Now, you can fix this by using web services like Dropbox, but if you want something more specific and easier to setup, this might not be a good fit.
That’s where applications like iPhotoSync come in. This one in particular aims to offer an easy iPhoto synchronization process across different computers, so that you can automatically have the same photographs available on all your machines. But does it deliver?
Anyone who works extensively with diagrams will be hard-pressed to find a more full-featured application than OmniGraffle. It packs all the functions anyone needs to create attractive and professional charts, graphs and diagrams.
But how about those of us with less formal diagramming needs? How does OmniGraffle work for us? We’ll be exploring this question today as we uncover the power of this mainstay of the Mac environment.
Apple does a pretty good job providing us with an array of smart looking icons as part of OS X. Most software companies that develop for Mac do the same. Their clientele is just a little more conscious of great icon design – or maybe just more easily persuaded with something shiny.
Whatever the case, sometimes we find an icon lacking for one reason or another. Sometimes we feel the need to add a little personal touch. Icon designers have answered the call and there are now millions (I’m guessing here, but there are a lot!) of beautifully designed icons for us to use.
It’s not too tough to change an icon with Mac OS X, but it’s not the most straightforward process either. Wouldn’t it be great if there was some utility to manage all these fancy little things? Turns out there is – and it’s called IconBox. Read on to find out more!
