Rubbernet – Network Bandwidth Monitor for Mac
Rubbernet – Conceited Software – $29.99
It wasn’t that long ago that we used to fire up a dial-up modem when we wanted to connect to the Internet and check something out. After we’d tied up the only phone line into the house and pissed off other members of the family who wanted to make a phone call but got line noise screeched down their ears, we’d get offline and continue using our computers with no wider connectivity. Times have changed of course and us first-worlders now treat the Internet like any service that’s connected to our house. But none of this means that bandwidth is suddenly some infinite resource, any more than electricity or water is. And when you want to find out what’s consuming all your bandwidth, it’s actually a fairly tricky process.
Rubbernet’s job is to monitor all the network traffic in and out of your Mac. On the dashboard you get a summary of what’s running at that moment, a list of apps and their statuses, upstream and downstream charts and access to further computers you might be monitoring. This being a Lion-friendly app, you can view fullscreen (great for network monitoring stations) or resize the in-app windows as you see fit.
The main window displays the apps, their status (active, inactive or idle), which user ‘owns’ that app, download and upload rates, total data downloaded and uploaded and the last activity of that app. To keep tabs on your system, you can start Rubbernet when you start your Mac and just let it quietly record how much data each of your applications is consuming. It was something of an eye-opener for me to discover that I was getting through a couple of gigabytes of data in Firefox alone.
Rubbernet also enables you to isolate certain activities, such as Back To My Mac, Skype and the System. This is a great way of tracking down errant applications or processes that are eating up your precious bandwidth. I’d always wondered how much data Skype used and it turns out that it’s a pretty frugal sort of an application, while my web browser’s a data glutton.
If you want you can also monitor other Macs on your local network. To get everything set up you simply install a small system application on the target computer and you can connect to it when you first start Rubbernet. In this way it’s possible for a system admin to track data usage on individual Macs on the network – the connections tab is particularly useful in this regard because it enables you to view hosts, ports, apps and bandwidth usage.
If you need to do some network detective work because something’s consuming far too much bandwidth, then Rubbernet’s perfect for the job. It enables you to monitor everything that’s going out from and into your Mac or other Macs on your local network. It has a clean and easily read interface, a minimalist but carefully designed feature-list and a reasonable pricetag. Recommended.
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Soulver – the Calculator for the Rest of Us
Like many people, I’m no maths whizz. Sure I can do standard multiplication and addition and I’ll even attempt a basic equation if you give me enough time, but I often struggle with things like percentages. And it was with just that in mind that the developers of Soulver decided to bring aid to mathematical knuckle-heads like me.
Soulver is what the developers call a ‘back of the envelope’ calculator. You know the sort of sums – like when you’re sitting in a car dealership desperately trying to work out what the real cost of that new car is. It enables you to phrase your calculations as you’d speak them.
So for instance you can type ‘$175-10%’ to find the markdown on an item, or ’35 as a % of 200′. The app works somewhat like a ready reckoner, keeping a running total of all your calculations at the bottom of the screen, so you can just use it to type in a long list of numbers and get a round total at the end.
Amongst Soulver’s neater features is a built-in realtime currency converter, a realtime calculator for stocks (such as 500AAPL), the use of variables and a full set of mathemetical functions (such as pi or COS). When you’ve finished your calculations you can output them in PDF or HTML format if required.
The natural language design of Soulver is a great way of doing sums without too much head-scratching. You can jot down your calculations as you think of them, labeling items with any text you want to use. If you struggle with real-world arithmetic, then Soulver’s the answer to your prayers. It’s available now in the App Store for $25USD.
Evi – an intelligent personal assistant, only without the intelligent bit
Ever since Apple released the awesome Siri with the iPhone4S others have been scrambling to catch up. Microsoft had a go, Android developers tried their luck and various other existing iPhone devs pimped their talk-and-respond apps. But they were all, for the most part, shite – pale imitations that didn’t even come close to Siri’s accuracy, flexiblity and fact-finding capabilities.
The latest app to step in the ring with Siri and try its luck is Evi. I’d read good reviews of this app elsewhere and despite the huge number of one star reviews in the app store, I paid my dollar and downloaded it. First impressions were good, it sports a similarly simple interface to Siri and has a great layout with cool off-whites and dark grey dialog boxes.
So first I asked Evi what the current temperature was. I’d already given the app permission to access my phone’s location and thought it might check the weather and report back with a figure. Instead Evi suggested, “The web page might be useful for that Intellicast – Current Temperatures in United States“. Ermm great, firstly I’m in Australia, secondly I’d have liked an actual figure, not a link to a website.
Then I try one of the examples that the developers actually list when you first start the app. I asked, “Pubs near here”. Despite the fact that there are two pubs in my town, it couldn’t find them and suggested I check Yelp for results in a town 20km from here. Awesome. Since it had at least identified a town near here, I figured I’d find out what films were on there and the best Evi can do is a link to a film previews website. Rapidly losing the will to live, I asked Evi, “What films did Robert De Niro star in?” Evi did at least recognise the name Robert De Niro, but instead of serving up some useful information, gives me a link to De Niro’s entry in Wikipedia. Not very helpful.
Finally Evi gave up completely. Any search requests you try now are greeted with an apology from the developers that suggests that they massively underestimated the demand that would be placed on their question-and-response servers. Which isn’t really good enough. I hope they work the bugs out, but at the moment Evi’s about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
ReadNow – Great Looking ReadItLater and Instapaper Client for Mac
Some applications that you can get on the Mac manage to redefine the software scene all on their own. One of those applications is called Reeder, an RSS newsreader with a gorgeous sophisticated interface. Since it came out numerous applications have modelled themselves on it, not all successfully.
ReadNow is a client for bookmarking services ReadItLater and Instapaper. It aims to provide the same slick environments for reading longer form articles that reader does for your RSS newsfeeds. Its usefulness or otherwise thus depends entirely on how often you bookmark interesting articles with ReadItLater and Instapaper. It’s worth pointing out at this stage that ReadItLater is free, while Instapaper is a subscription service. For what it’s worth I’ve been more than happy with my free ReadItLater account.
There’s little doubt, that Readnow gets closer to the high standards of Reeder than any other app has so far. It utilises the same triple column display, combined with excellent on-screen text rendering and a sophisticated article layout. On the left of the screen you can see your ReadItLater and Instapaper feeds, along with any tags you attached to them. In the middle pane is the actual article list, which can be arranged in date, title, URL or tag order. To read an article simply click on in the middle pane 
and it’s downloaded and rendered in the viewing pane on the right of the display.
There are several viewing styles for the viewing pane, but the best looking for my money is the default paper style. As you’re reading your chosen article, you can utilise the built-in gestures to move backwards and forwards through your bookmarks, archive bookmark or move backwards and forwards through your folders. If you want to, you can also send the article onwards again, to another service such as Twitter or Evernote.
I was initially unconvinced by the need for an app like ReadNow, but having spent a few weeks using it, I have to admit it’s one of my most regularly used applications. It’s a beautifully designed and eminently useful application that sits well alongside applications such as Reeder, Raven and Reddit HD. Its usefulness stems from the fact that you can differentiate those longer articles that take a bit more time to read and absorb, from shorter links such as news articles. If you’re a word junkie like me, then you’ll find it far nicer to use than the browser based versions of ReadItLater and Instapaper.
Update: Just noticed that Michael Schneider, ReadNow’s author, has pulled it from the app store for now due to an infringement letter. I’ll leave this review online in the hope that Michael resolves his legal difficulties and the app’s put back online.
Read MoreDragon Express – Dictation Software for the Facebook Generation
Dragon Express – $50 – Mac App Store
The problem with most dictation apps is that they are perceived as rather serious bits of software. It’s the sort of software, that you’d use to write your novel, or perhaps write up some scientific notes or that deposition for your court case. 
It’s certainly not the first thing you think of when you decide to update your Facebook status. But it’s precisely for updates on social media sites,and all those other real-world day-to-day tasks that Dragon Express has been created. This is dictation software for ‘everyone else’.
Unlike other dictation software, which you start when you want to dictate some lengthy piece of text, Dragon Express is designed to always be at hand. It’s activated by clicking on its icon in the menu bar or by hitting a preconfigured hotkey. Then all you need to do is dictate your text and direct the output to the application of your choice. 
By default, Dragon Express can send your dictated text to the clipboard, Spotlight, Google, your e-mail, face book or twitter. When you’ve finished dictating you can hit a hotkey such as Command-2 to capture your text to the clipboard.
In practice I found Dragon Express to be a a competent, but not terrific, dication app. The enrolment procedure only takes about five minutes, but if you decide to use a start using a different microphone then you have to repeat that process. It’s also worth noting that if you switch microphones (from say the internal microphone to a headset) then you lose all the text in the dictation window – found out about that one the hard way. Accuracy of dictation was lousy when using my MacBook Pro’s built-in microphone (in a very quiet office), but improved drastically when I plugged in my Logitech USB headset. Having to wear a headset to dictate text, cramps the spontaneity that this app is supposed to foster.
I can fully understand why Dragon decided to create this application. They want to tap into the home market and create something that has real-world use. However the logic is flawed; who in their right mind would use dictation software to bang out a 140 character tweet? And given issues surrounding the accuracy of the dictation, would you really trust it with your Facebook status updates? I’m not convinced, by the ‘social’ leanings of this application, but I think it’s perfectly good for things like email correspondence. It’s also worth pointing out, that at an (introductory) price of $50, it’s certainly not cheap and you’d have to consider if you needed the long list of extra features in the full suite which costs $189. An interesting application then, but not the solution to R.S.I. that I was hoping for.
Final Cut Pro X – The ‘Rest of us’ Review
Final Cut Pro – Apple – $299 (Trial available)
You may recall a certain bun fight that happened a couple of months ago. Apple released a brand new version of their best-selling video editing software Final Cut Pro. They had, they said, rebuilt it from the ground up, because the old code was well past its use-by date. Fair enough, you’d have thought. Only on release the software was nearly universally derided for being little more than iMovie Pro. Video editors the world over took to the Internet and spat gobs of wordy venom at Apple. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it was free global advertising for what is, let’s not forget, very much a niche product.
Read MoreAnalog – One Click Photo Enhancer
When I was a kid I got my first camera – a Kodak 126 Instamatic. It took little rolls of film that came in plastic containers, each with 26 exposures. When you’d taken all your photos you’d drop the film off at the chemists and a week later you got your photos and your negatives back. To be honest, it was a pain in the arse. It was expensive and, due to the costs of getting photos developed and printed, a painfully drawn-out process. I do not miss the mechanics of film photography but I do miss the soul that those old photos had.
When Hipstamatic came out for the iPhone it was in response to the somewhat sterile photographs that the iPhone (and indeed all digital cameras) take. With Hipstamatic on your iPhone you could reclaim a little bit of that old film photography feeling, even if it was the result of carefully created effects and not the random effects of light on cellulose and chemicals on paper. Hipstamatic went on to become a phenomenon, inspiring countless clones and knock-offs including most recently Instagram.
Up until recently however there wasn’t any way of bringing those retro photo styles to your Mac and, if you wanted a Lomo or Holga look to your photos you had to use Lightroom or Photoshop. Analog from RealMac Software is the first proper attempt to bring retro photography retouching 
tools to the Mac desktop and more importantly to everyday users, not just Photoshop experts.
Analog comes with 20 effects built-in and 14 different frames. To use the app you simply drag your photo into the window, select an effect, choose a border and export when you’re ready. The focus is clearly on simplicity first and foremost – there is no way to alter the effects or borders – all you can do is rotate, crop, filter, border and export. If you’re the sort of person who likes fiddling with settings then this is not the application for you – if you’re the sort of person that just wants a quick and easy way to enhance an otherwise dull photo then you’ll love it.
The effects themselves are somewhat disappointing. There’s some classics in there, such as cross process, Lomo, Fuji and Holga, but none of them slap you in the face with their funkiness. Best of the bunch are Kyoto (nice light leak filter), Lomia and Noir. The borders are fairly unexciting too, with the usual smattering of Polaroid style squares and film negative embellishments. Once you’ve settled on a filter and/or border, you can export your photo, send it via email or upload to CloudApp, Facebook, Flickr or Picassa.
RealMac have endevoured to bring some variety to the filters by adding random elements to them. Light leaks appear in different sizes and locations, dust and scratches are positioned randomly and grain is applied differently each time, so it’s worth clicking on and off the same effect a few times to achieve the look you want. It’s also worth adding that’s a well written application that performs well and is bug-free.`
We’ve all come to see the possibilities of retro-styled digital photo retouching, but the problem is that apps like Hipstamatic hammered the living shit out of the concept and Instagram slammed its coffin shut. For someone with no technical expertise at all and a taste for cheesy photo effects, Analog will be a big hit. However if you’d rather your photos didn’t look like everyone else’s, or you don’t feel the need to festoon your snapshots in light leaks and bokeh (no matter how simple it is), then this is not the app for you.
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Envelope – Reeder style Reddit client for Mac
With over a billion monthly pageviews, Reddit has rapidly risen in popularity and is now one of the elite top 100 most viewed websites on the Internet. Its rise coincided with the implosion of Digg and the disappearance of Delicious amongst link spam and chronic apathy. While both Digg and Delicious may yet turn things around, Reddit’s currently sitting pretty amongst the link-sharing sites thanks to a great user-administrated culture, simple link voting tools and, amazingly, popular ‘sub-reddits’ such as science and atheism.
As functional as Reddit is, however, the site is certainly not a thing of beauty. It features a sparse text-based layout that eschews all graphic adornment as needless frippery. This means that the site’s quick and efficient, but also very bland to use. Well now Mac users can have the best of both worlds, thanks to the launch of Envelope – the first full-blown Reddit client.
There’s little doubt that Envelope has been heavily influenced by the look of the new Mail client in Lion and by Reeder the RSS feed client. On the left of the screen you get the topic headings in the Reddit section, on the right you get content and/or comments. To change to a different sub-reddit, you just click on the link at the bottom of the topic pane or alternatively you can hot-key back and forth between them.
The main panel can be configured to show a post’s content, its comments or both in either vertical or horizontal modes. Neither of the hybrid modes is perfect,particularly if you’re viewing a picture posting of some kind, because there’s no way to zoom in or out of any pictures. 
Also, there’s no reflowing of text in the comments panel, so you usually have to scroll horizontally to view all the text in a comment.
While Envelope borrows many design cues from Reeder, it lacks that app’s brutal attention to detail. Text is not rendered in a very attractive way and while you can configure the font size and choose between either Helvetica Neue or Lucida Grande to display text, neither of them look particularly great in this context. It doesn’t help that there’s no gutter around the text so it tends to set right next to the edges, adding to the cluttered feel of the app.
If a post you’ve clicked on references a web page, then Envelope renders that in the main content window, but again, there’s no text reflow so you have to scroll horizontally to read all the text if you’re in vertical display mode. YouTube and Vimeo videos will play happily in the content window, because it uses the WebKit (Safari) browser engine and so will display anything your browser does. This means you don’t have to keep flicking between browser tabs.
Commenting is probably Envelope’s strongest feature. Comments are rendered clearly and you can up or downvote directly from the window. If you want to reply to a post, you can do that 
too, but you’ll see none of the formatting tips that you’ll find on the website, so unless you know your Reddit shortcodes off by heart, you’ll need to reference the website.
Amongst the other quirks we noticed while testing the app was the fact that the full-screen button for Lion disappears from the button bar once you use it. Also comments when viewed all conform to the same 640pixel wide column, no matter which view mode your in – it would surely make more sense to have this reflow across the width of the screen? Even worse, there’s no indication in the topics panel of which articles you’ve read – formatting does not change once you’ve read something.
In the app’s preferences you can control article and comment fonts and size, although as I mentioned, there’s only two fonts and neither of them look great. There’s also a web content tab for toggling javascript, images and java on or off and toggling integration with Imgur and YouTube. There’s also some basic gesture support and, of course, the all-important Reddit log-in option.
This is a promising application, but it feels unfinished and sloppy for a first release. If the developer was aiming for the look and feel or Reeder, Mail or Sparrow then he fell well short of the mark. There are bugs, display issues, inconsistent navigation and strange formatting errors everywhere. With some time and attention to detail I feel that this app could equal the quality of the afore-mentioned apps and over time I’m sure the developer will take care of the issues mentioned in this review, but at the moment I find it hard to recommend this over simply visiting the website in your browser.
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Freebie of the Week – Domain Name Analyser
Hunting for domain names is a pretty depressing task. Normally you have a bit of a think, scribble some word ideas down and then search for those domains on your favourite domain registration site. Occasionally you get lucky, but 
most of the time you spend an hour or two hunting and then inevitably end up doing for the domain you thought of first.
Well fret no more, because the excellent Domain Name Analyser takes all the pain out of domain hunting. It can search for domains based on keywords and templates and can check for the availability of anything it turns up at the same time. It can search on a huge variety of international domains and you can add to the list if required. It’ll also check domains about to expire, past expiry or even newly registered.
Read MoreThe Tightwad Test – Just How Useable is a $99 Tablet?
When HP decided to pull the pin on their promising TouchPad tablet, it lead to some extraordinary events. Faced with warehouses full of virtually valueless stock, HP gave retailers permission to slash the price of their WebOS powered devices. The fire sale lead to long queues outside electrical retailers all around the world as word spread on Twitter and the link-sharing sites that the $99 was now the sort of bargain you simply couldn’t ignore. Within about 24 hours all the units had been sold and thousands of people regretted not hearing about it sooner.
The TouchPad debacle lead to increased interest in budget tablets and soon the social networks were abuzz with news of another tablet which, while it was nowhere near as good, still represented excellent value for money. Here in Australia the ZTE9 tablet was being sold by local mobile telco Optus as the MyTab for $99AUD with a 6Gb data package. Within about 36 hours all stocks of the tablet had gone and all retailers both high street and online had sold out. As a Mac and iPhone using geek, I was interested in finding out just what use a $99 tablet is, so I picked one up from electrical retail chain Dick Smiths via their online store. With postage and packing it cost me the grand total of $129. Two days later I took delivery of my cheapo tablet and started to take it through its paces.
Read MoreFreebie of the Week – Skitch
There have been a few occasions where I have regretted purchasing software, but the number one occasion on which I mutter under my breath and fling an exotic curse or two in the direction of software companies, is when something I paid good money for gets released for free. Skitch is just such an app – I bought it in the App Store about six
months ago and now it’s in there for free because Evernote bought it. My loss is your gain and the fact that it’s now free does not detract from the fact that Skitch is a great app.
Skitch is a screen-grab tool of the same type as LittleSnapper. It enables you to grab fullscreen, app or Finder windows, frames, cross-haired selection or cam images either via hotkey or the menubar icon. Once you’ve got your image in Skitch’s view window, you can manipulate and/or modify it and then transfer it somewhere else. You get a selection of drawing tools to doodle on your image with (boxes, circles, speech bubbles, text boxes etc) and useful features such as rotate, resize and crop.
Once you’re happy with your annotated image, you can transfer it somewhere else. You can save it out to your hard drive, email it, Bluetooth it and upload to Evernote, or Flickr or any FTP service. Skitch is the sort of app that’s going to have wide appeal – if you see something online you can grab a screenshot, annotate it and get it online with minimum fuss. It was a good deal when it cost $20, now that it’s free you’d have to be crazy not to grab it.
Read MoreFreebie of the Week – TweetComb for Android
There’s been some real innovation lately with Twitter clients, with slick interfaces that reflect the nature of the micro-blogging environment. The best Twitter clients enable you to flick easily between trends, check mentions and retweets simply and navigate your way through the users that you’re following.
TweetComb is a great looking and beautifully designed free Twitter client for Android Honeycomb. The main Dashboard screen is split 
three ways and can display your Timeline, Mentions, Direct Messages, Profile, Search and Favourites as you wish. It’s a great interface for swift and efficient navigation of all those accounts that you’re following.
The app supports the usual Twitter goodies such as Bit.ly, Twitlonger, Twitpic and yFrog and updates in the background so you always get the freshest feeds when you check back. Tweetcomb can be set to notify you when a fresh tweet appears in the timeline, but if you’re following more than a couple of people this can get annoying. It’s a great Twitter client for tablet users, although it’s somewhat disappointing that it’s only available for Honeycomb and not any earlier iterations of Android..
Read MoreThe Best Form Fillers for Mac, PC and Mobile – Round-up
The web is booming like never before. More and more businesses are setting up online portals and funky new web services are starting up every day. Which is all well and good, but it also means that web surfers spend a lot of time entering the exact same details into online forms over and over again. But it doesn’t have to be that way – by installing a form filler add-on for your browser you can complete mundane form entries in a single click.
Read MoreitDJ – Free DJ Mixing App for Mac
itDJ – Free – Macroplant
There are some excellent free DJing suites available for the Mac, some great budget ones and a redundant record box full of full-blown commercial apps. Currently Mac owners can download Virtual DJ Home and Mixx in the App Store, both of which have large user bases and, in the case of Virtual DJ, a clear upgrade path to a more comprehensive package should a bedroom DJ decide to move up to the DJ booth.
itDJ certainly has the feel of a free app and while I realise that this means we ought to take it easier on the software, there are other free DJ apps available for the Mac and itDJ has to be reviewed with this in mind. 
So the first thing to say about this software is that the interface is all over the place – metal styled knobs, old school folders and nasty buttons. It’s probably best to say that it isn’t a thing of beauty but I’d forgive the ugliest of interfaces if the functionality made up for it.
In terms of layout you get a vaguely Serato Itch style interface, with a couple of decks at the top and the music list at the bottom of the screen. There’s pitch and gain controls for each deck, along with EQ knobs per-deck. Music you cue up by dragging it onto either of the decks is shown at the top of the screen in over-lapping waveforms – red for the left deck and blue for the right. There’s a master BPM setting in the middle of the decks along with the obligatory cross-fader. It’s a fairly ramshackle arrangement.
In terms of sonic goodies, there’s actually some fairly cool tools to play with. Principle amongst these is a neat beat mixer that enables you to chop a track up in 2, 4, 8 or 16 beat chunks. It works surprisingly well and syncs nicely between beat modes. There’s also an effects tab with the obligatory reverb and flanger and a wahwah which can be set to match beats and works well when combined with a loop.
The loops and cues tab, an essential tool for any digital DJ these days, is a bit hit-and-miss. This comes down to the fact that itDJ’s beat detection isn’t exactly world-beating and so while the cue points function well, 
getting a loop on the money is not guaranteed. There is a cool loop shifter slider that enables you to flick your 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, 4 or 8 bar loop up and down the track.
Many digital DJs either don’t know how to beat-match tracks or choose not to and so the Sync feature is all-important. We found this to be lacking – unless there was a crystal clear bass or high-hat for the sync to latch onto, it failed to find the beat. In comparison to Virtual DJ Home’s syncing facility, it’s woefully inadequate. This wouldn’t be so bad if it was easy to mix the ‘old fashioned’ way, but the virtual decks are non-functional and did nothing no matter how we moved the mouse pointer on them, so to beatmatch you have to use the top waveform to nudge, speed up or slow down the track and it simply doesn’t work in any useful way.
Hidden behind a toggled FX Panel button are four sample decks, 16 effects slots which you can fill with your own police sirens and ‘woo-yea’s and a full sequencer. The latter seemed like a vaguely bizarre thing to add to a DJ mixing application and its painfully simple design wouldn’t add much to any set beyond, possibly, getting you out of trouble if a track comes to its end before you’re ready to cue up the next one. itDJ also appears to have some basic support for MIDI mixing panels, but it’s not clear which ones it supports or indeed if you need to do the button mapping yourself.
The bottom line is that this digital DJing package simply doesn’t cut it in any meaningful way. If I was being charitable I’d say it was a step up from using iTunes to DJ with – but only just. Given just how good the also free Mixx and Virtual DJ Home are and given the fact that many people get Traktor LE free with their digital DJ decks or MIDI panels, you’d have to be fairly desparate to consider using itDJ. It does have a nice icon though.
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