This year’s MacHeist includes 11 applications in the bundle, which individually would sell for $368.75. When bought as part of the MacHeist promotion, the whole collection is under $50.
Now, it’s a rare person who would want and use every single one of these applications; there’s just too much variety to have everything fit perfectly. But if even half of them would be useful, then you’re way, way ahead.
For me, the big winners are 1password, TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro, and Pixelmator. Pixelmator alone costs $10 more than the bundle, and I’d been meaning to buy it for over a month, since this terrific review of Pixelmator appeared in Macworld magazine. So buying the bundle was an easy decision.
Maybe it will be for you as well.
Last Friday I bought an 8 gigabyte iPhone at an Apple store. I’ve been using the phone for a week now, and overall, while there are certainly flaws and omissions, it is a spectacular synthesis of hardware and software excellence. No other handheld device I’ve used even comes close, including the seven previous iPods I’ve owned. It’s a major advance in mobile phones, and in computing generally, and while I certainly look forward to getting the 2nd generation product, I’m going to love this 1st generation device all on its own.
Beyond that general impression, I have a few specific things I thought would be worth writing about.
[click to continue…]
We bought a Sonos Digital Music System back in September 2006, and I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while. It’s a terrific product that has us listening to music far more regularly than we ever did. What’s more, it works pretty well with audiobooks that we’ve imported into iTunes or purchased from Audible.com, which is nice for listening to them when we’re moving around (e.g., in the kitchen), when an iPod and headphones might get in the way.
[click to continue…]
I watched the Apple WWDC Keynote video stream last week, and have been following the reactions online about features demonstrated for the next version of Mac OS X, 10.5 (“Leopard”). A lot of people (especially non-Mac users) have commented that features like Spaces and even Time Machine have already been done on other operating systems, or as third-party utilities for OS X. They’re missing the point. What’s great about these new features in Leopard is their accessibility to normal people, i.e., their simple interfaces.
[click to continue…]
In addition to posting a few beta versions of a minor patch release to Eudora 6.2, the current version of Eudora for Mac OS X, QUALCOMM apparently is getting enough inquiries about the long-anticipated (and overdue) Cocoa rewrite of Eudora to have recently posted an official statement about it.
It doesn’t sound particularly close, but making a statement at all seems to imply that there continues to be commitment and progress, and I consider it a positive sign. I’d love to see betas of the new version, too, but we take what we can get.
Update: This post contains useful information about the Join Together utility, but has been superseded by a new article that details additional options, for both Mac and Windows users. See How to join multiple tracks into a single audiobook file for the new information.
One of the top two questions I get asked about audiobooks by visitors to Aldo on Audiobooks is, after importing a bunch of audiobook CDs, is there any way to join the many tracks together to get a single track for the audiobook?
For a while I simply shrugged, and said I hadn’t found a good tool. Then I found a good tool, and added it to the FAQ, but didn’t advertise it too heavily because it was only available for Mac users. But with the latest release the tool has gotten so good, I feel the need to share and promote it. (Windows users, I am sorry, but I haven’t found anything for you yet.)
Doug Adams runs a terrific site called Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Now on its fifth revision, his Join Together tool has evolved from a basic AppleScript into a stand-alone application which gives you a terrific interface for combining tracks and adding the right metadata such as title and author, along with options to convert to different formats, and even add chapter marks to the resulting merged track:
It’s truly an outstanding piece of work. If you’re importing audiobooks on a Mac, get it now. And if you use it and like it, be sure to thank Doug with a donation!
Last weekend I was in Chicago for the first ever RailsConf, a gathering of about 600 people focused on developing web applications using the Ruby on Rails application framework. Other people are posting lots of details and thoughts (try clicking the RailsConf tag below), so I’ll just add a few deltas:
[click to continue…]
I’m sure a million people will be linking today to the Apple announcement of Boot Camp, a new utility which now makes it both possible and easy to install Microsoft Windows XP onto an Intel-based Mac. I’m also sure most of them will put their amateur analyst hats on, and tell people what they think it means. (Most will be wrong.)
My interest in and comments on the announcement are quite a bit less global in scope.
[click to continue…]
