Tech Tips: cool software and other stuff

Soft­ware

One of the best soft­ware bun­dles released for Mac users over the years has been the MacHeist Bun­dle. Pretty much on an annual basis MacHeist pulls together the best and most user friendly appli­ca­tions for the Mac for a “Fire” sale which really isn’t one but it seems like it. You can always count on at least one extremely saught high priced app to be included. This time around they have out done them­selves by includ­ing six appli­ca­tions over $50.00, the total actual cost of the bun­dle if bought sep­a­rately is $930.00. The bun­dle cost is $39.00…not a bad deal. The really great thing is that they donate 25% of every pur­chase to the fol­low­ing charities:

• Action against Hunger
• AIDS Research Alliance
• Alliance For Cli­mate Protection
• Direct Relief International
• Humane Soci­ety International
• The Nature Conservancy
• Save the Children
• Save Dar­fur
• Pre­vent Can­cer Foundation
• World Wildlife Fund

Here are some of the appli­ca­tions that I think will really be use­ful espe­cially for artists

Pic­turesque

A sim­ple photo edit­ing soft­ware that is almost like a scaled down Pho­to­shop. While its’ tool set is lim­ited it does seem to give you the abil­ity to make your pho­tos pop and it includes some batch actions that allow you to apply the same treat­ment to more than one image. I’ll be test­ing the soft­ware so check back for my full evaluation.

Acorn

Is another very promis­ing graphic edi­tor that goes a lit­tle fur­ther than Pic­turesque.  Acorn’s fea­ture set includes many of the same tools in Pho­to­shop but much more ori­ented to the non-photoshop user.

Kine­matic

If you have ever wanted to make a really cool pre­sen­ta­tion that screams pro­fes­sion­al­ism this is the tool. Kine­matic gives you 3D ani­ma­tion tools that can turn any 2d pre­sen­ta­tion into some­thing extremely unboring!

Wire Tap Studio

If you have ever had a han­ker­ing for record­ing well…anything you can hear this is the tool. Audio clips are extremely impor­tant for any­one who blogs or has a web pres­ence because they can eas­ily become viral, mean­ing lots of traf­fic back to your site. Of course you can use Garage Band but I find it extremely counter intu­itive and not very user friendly and I’m kind of a Geek!

BoinxTV

I haven’t tested this appli­ca­tion yet but it looks promis­ing if you want to eas­ily make pro­fes­sional “how-To” videos of your work, or if you just want to show a tour of your studio.

Espresso

For the Code Geeks or “I know enough to be dan­ger­ous..” types this appli­ca­tion helps you create,find and save code for web applications.

The bun­dle has only 8 days left before it goes off the mar­ket, to read more and pur­chase the bun­dle go to http://www.macheist.com/

Tips & Tricks

Fav­i­con

How do you get that lit­tle image thingy to show up on your browser, you know the one that always shows up for most web sites? What’s it for anyway..?

Well that thing is called a fav­i­con and is basi­cally an image that is sized any­where from 16x16 to 32x32 pixels.

Hav­ing a fav­i­con is very impor­tant because it shows up in book­mark lists and helps iden­tify a site if you use tabs in your browser. More impor­tantly it is one of those small things that lets peo­ple know you are seri­ous about what you are doing. As artists every lit­tle thing that can help us be seen as pro­fes­sional is one more thing that moves us up a notch in our buy­ers minds.

Any­way, before I show you how to do it there is one caveat, you will need to be able access the root folder that holds your site or blog. If you are using a ser­vice like Type­Pad, you will be able to access this folder in the “files” tab of the con­trol panel.

If you are using a self hosted Word Press site like this one, you’ll need an FTP pro­gram or other back end access to your server.

So to make your fav­i­con first cre­ate a square image using a photo or other graphic then go to one of the fav­i­con cre­at­ing sites like this one  fav­i­con maker. You can upload your image and the site will gen­er­ate the appro­pri­ate size choices which you can then download.

To upload access the first level direc­tory that holds your site and upload the gen­er­ated fav­i­con into that directory.

Impor­tant:

Make sure that the file is named “favicon.ico” oth­er­wise it won’t work. Next just sit back and wait it can take a few hours before the image starts to show up.

There is another way for self hosted Word Press sites to get a fav­i­con and that is by using the MaxBlog­Press Fav­i­con plu­gin it pretty much does it all for you.

Uni­ver­sal Avatar

With so many sites ask­ing for your mug shot one of the eas­i­est ways to only do it once is to use Gra­vatar a ser­vice sim­i­lar to OpenID. Gra­vatar allows you to upload you mug shot or avatar image and then aut­mat­i­cally dis­trib­utes it to when you make a com­ment on a blog, sign up for a social net­work­ing site or any­thing else that is linked up with Gravatar.

Here is what you do:

Go to the Gra­vatar site sign-up and Select the loca­tion of your avatar

Upload it or insert the requested info

Crop your image

Select and con­firm it

That’s it and your mug/avatar will be auto­mat­i­cally used wher­ever it is needed!