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So recently I purchased yet another great software bundle of Mac software. This bundle was the “Back to School Bundle” from MacUpdate. This bundle included a number of interesting applications, among them is one called MacJournal. Now I don’t know too much about MacJournal, but my basic understanding is it is an application that lets users keep personal journals. It also supports blogging from my understanding….so I decided to try it out to see if I could easily post a blog entry using it. That is what this is entry is all about…. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Ok so I was able to easily get this posted to my blog even through I wasn’t given a choice for WordPress blogs (odd). I did have a few formatting issues 1) any quotes were not rendered properly (this is a character code issue) 2) couldn’t figure out how to align my images, but sure with more than 5 minutes I can figure this out. Anyway looks like it has potential…I’ll keep checking it out.

About a month ago I decided to try MarsEdit, a desktop blogging application for the Mac. The idea behind MarsEdit was to provide a better interface for creating,editing and managing blog post. As someone that maintains and writes for multiple blogs, this was something that sounded interesting. After all the web interfaces were often somewhat less than ideal, especially if you write for several different blogs. There were passwords and URLs to remember and lets face it even the best web interfaces are still not as responsive as a good ole desktop application.

Overall I was quite impressed with MarsEdit. Yes there were a few small things that I didn’t like, but overall I thought it was a far superior experience to the multiple web interfaces I was using to provide content to several blogs. In fact so impressed was I that I was ready to go ahead and purchase MarEdit, but before I did I thought it would be worthwhile to check out the competition.

Perhaps the best known competitor in the desktop blogging space on the Mac is a program called ecto by Adriaan Tijsseling of infinite sushi. I had seen several positive reviews on both MarsEdit and ecto, so I thought I would give the trial version of ecto a spin, before I purchased either.So that is exactly what I am doing – I am writing this post using ecto the feature-rich desktop blogging client for Mac OSX. The trial version of ecto is a 21 day trial (9 less than MarsEdit or the typical 30 day trial), so I will give it whirl and see which one better suits my needs. I do see some promising aspects to ecto, like the Amazon integration. I did download the newest release, which is ecto 3, which is still a beta today as I write this entry. At anyrate I’ll post my thoughts once I have used ecto for a few weeks and let you know which one I decide to buy.

One of the things I really love about my Mac is all of the really great software available for it. It’s kinda of ironic that before I moved to the Mac platform I had the impression that there wasn’t as much software for the Mac. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. There are many small and mid-sized Mac software development shops that really seem to get it – producing highly polished, usable software at an affordable price.

One of the ways that I have discovered many great Mac software applications has been by purchasing software bundles. Recently I purchased the MacHeist software bundle that included 14 great applications for $49 – what a deal. There were many great applications in the bundle, some in fact that I already owned (fortunately with MacHeist you can gift the license if you already own it – which is what I did). When I purchase software bundles I typically find that there are a couple applications that I really want and others that I know little or nothing about. In the case of the recent MacHeist bundle it was SnapZ Pro, AppZapper and ChaChing that really motivated me to buy the bundle. I already owned CSSEdit and Pixelmator, which are both fantastic. However sometimes it is the hidden gems that turn out to be really exciting.

Last week I was staying at a hotel while attending a training class. It seemed like a good opportunity to try out one of the other applications that came with the MacHeist bundle – Awaken 4.0. Awaken is basically an alarm clock for your Mac. I never really thought about wanting to turn my Mac into a fancy alarm clock, but suddenly it seemed like a good time to try it out. You know what? It is very useful and worked quite well. The program allows you to set multiple alarms and wake up to your choice of music or sounds. It also has a simple egg timer and sleep timer as well. The program will first wake your computer, then launch iTunes and then slowly start the music and wake you up. It is simple and works flawlessly. Anyway if you find you need to turn your Mac into an alarm clock check out Awaken 4.0.

Well well well it has been some time since my last blog entry. Why you might ask? Well no good excuse other than I have been very busy over the course of the last several months. In November I got involved with a large project for a nationally known American magazine. Not a project that I can discuss at the moment, but something that could be very interesting. Of course the holiday season is always busy as well. I also was working on preparing the curriculum for a class that began teaching in January (more details coming soon on that one). So now that I have given a few excuses the truth is that sometimes blogging is just too hard….it takes time and when one gets busy it is sometimes one of the first things on the chopping block.

What if blogging could be easier? Well thanks to some software from Red Sweater Software it might become a little easier. Red Sweater makes a piece of software called Mars Edit. Mars Edit is basically a desktop application that lets you write and post blog entries. Why would you need that – not like it is difficult to get online and use WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, etc… That is true, in fact I have a couple blogs running on WordPress and it is a pretty nice system. The advantage of something like Mars Edit is that you can manage many blogs from one desktop interface. Rather than having to log on to each of my blogs individually I can set them up in Mars Edit and quickly post to any and all of them. The interface is nice and fairly intuitive – and of course it feels like a desktop application (as it should). If you are not connected to the Internet – you can still write, although of course you can’t post until you are back online. It also makes it very easy add media from iPhoto or even Flickr. We commonly use Flickr to post to our son’s blog, but it is not the best process posting from Flickr. I often find that postings from Flickr need some pretty significant editing. Anyway Mars Edit looks like an interesting option, one I am sure will be especially interesting to those that post to more than one blog on a regular basis.

At this point I have downloaded a free trial to give it a spin. If it proves to be worthwhile I will certainly purchase a license. How will I determine if it is worthwhile? See if it gets me to blog more! Anyway it looks promising – check it out!

Prior to switching from Windows based PCs to OS X on the Mac I was under the impression that there wasn’t as much software available for the Mac platform. However, I can honestly say since I moved to the Mac I have purchased more software than all of my years on Windows. Why? A number of reasons, but I think one of the overwhelming reason has been that there is a lot of great software written for the Mac, it seems like I am always discovering great new programs for the Mac.

One of my recent discoveries was a program called ArtText from BeLight Software. ArtText is a simple yet powerful application that allows you to do all sorts of interesting things with text and graphics. With ArtText you can create logos, banners, buttons, icons and more. In ArtText you have materials such as glass, plastic and metal that have various properties and you apply the material (or the texture) to your text and vector images. The result? You end up with highly stylized text and graphics. Want a fancy web 2.0 badge? Use ArtText’s built in glass material to make a cool badge. Need to make a simple text logo? ArtText has plenty of options – you can even create your own materials. I would recommend you download a trial version and give it a spin.

Looking for a quick way to make beautiful images for the web? Well if you have a Mac Picturesque from Acqualia software might be for you. Winner of the best Mac OS X student product for the 2007 Apple Design Awards, Picturesque was written entirely in Cocoa by Zac Cohan and Nik Youdale.

Picturesque is a very simple and intuitive image enhancing application that does a few things and does them well. With Picturesque you can simply drag and drop images into the staging area and with a few clicks of the mouse easily apply a number of polished effect including: reflection, glow, shadow, rounded corners, stroke, fade and resize.  I’ve been using it for a few weeks now for the graphics for this blog and have found it to be very useful.

Take a look at this very short video to get a feel for what you can do with Picturesque. Download a demo from the Acqualia web site, decide to buy it – good news it is only $19.50 – nice price for a solid product.

If you are a software developer or coder of any kind you may find yourself using a file comparison or merge tool at some point. I have been using a product called Beyond Compare for a couple years now and found it to be a great utility. Unfortunately Scooter Software does not make a Mac version of Beyond Compare and while I could use it with Parallels on the Windows side of my MacBook Pro that wouldn’t be very practical in terms of work flow.

For some time I have been looking for a reasonably priced file comparison/merge tool for the Mac. I tried a trial version of zsCompare by ZizaSoft, which looked like a nice choice. The standard version is $99, which isn’t bad but seemed a little high, perhaps since I was comparing it to Beyond Compare. I decided to keep looking and found a nice resource on Wikipedia which was a comparison of file comparison tools.

One of the tools that I decided to evaluate was DiffCompare from SourceGear. DiffCompare has the following features:

• File diff, graphically shows the changes between two files. Includes intra-line highlighting and full support for editing.
• Merge, it graphically shows the changes between 3 files. Allows automatic merging (when safe to do so) and full control over editing the resulting file.
• Folder diff, performs a side-by-side comparison of 2 folders, showing which files are only present in one file or the other, as well as file pairs which are identical or different.
• Configurable. Rulesets and options provide for customized appearance and behavior.
• Cross-platform. Identical feature set on Windows, Mac OS X, and Unix.

I have only used it lightly at this point, but it looks promising – might be worth checking out if you are looking for a diff/comparision tool for Mac. Oh yeah and I almost forgot to mention the best part – it’s FREE!