Chimoosoft's Mac Picks and Reviews

• LotsaSnow and LotsaWater

• 1.4j/1.2j
• freeware
• 1/29/2007

Screen savers don't have any real use on modern LCD screens other than their entertainment value, but these screen savers definitely offer entertainment. LotsaSnow generates unique snowflakes and gently sprinkles them on your screen with options for setting parameters such as color, growth rate, and background visibility.

LotsaWater employs the much loved water droplet effect similar to the one used by Apple's Dashboard and lets water droplets fall randomly over the screen. Options to set the rainfall from gentle to pouring, water depth from shallow to deep, and others allow you to customize the behavior. Truly mesmerizing! A fairly modern computer is required for both of these; probably at least a 1.25 GHz G4 with a decent graphics card.

• By Circle Soft.
• download
• screenshot
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• The Missing Sync

• 5.1.2
• commercial
• 1/22/2007

The Missing Sync enables synchronization of calendars, contacts, photos, music, files, and more between Mac OS X and many portable devices including Palm OS, Windows Mobile, PSP, and coming soon, Blackberry. The version reviewed only syncs to Palm OS devices, but syncing to others should be similar.

For Palm users, the Palm desktop application included for Mac OS X looks and feels like something straight out of the mid 1990's and is hardly a suitable choice. Apple's bundled iSync software works, kind of, but doesn't support many devices and can be quite slow. The Missing Sync is really the best option out there for true Mac like synchronization fully integrated with Apple applications like Address Book, iCal, iTunes, iPhoto, and more.

In addition to the tight integration with iLife applications, The Missing Sync also has multiple connection options including USB and bluetooth. If you need synchronization with your Mac and can't afford an iPhone, this is the application for you.

• By markspace.
• buy
• screenshot
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• Wacom Graphire Bluetooth Tablet

• 1/15/2007

Mice may be ubiquitous in the modern computer world, but that doesn't make them the best choice for all activities. Aside from being difficult to use for precise graphics editing, mice can lead to or aggravate repetitive strain injuries (RSIs) - something to avoid at all cost.

Wacom graphics tablets provide a great alternative input device, and even if you don't spend all day editing in Photoshop they're well suited for mousing around as well. Another often overlooked benefit of using a pen based input device is Apple's built in Inkwell handwriting recognition technology. Inkwell allows you to write entire sentences on your tablet and have them translated to text just as if you were typing.

On the down side, clicking small targets is sometimes difficult since the pen is very sensitive and you may end up dragging rather than clicking. Also, the tablet doesn't play well with the previously reviewed Control Scroll Zoom; when zoomed, tablet clicks are offset and don't land where they should. It is unclear whether this is a problem with OS X or with Wacom's drivers. A tablet probably isn't a 100% replacement for a normal mouse or trackpad, but when used in conjunction with traditional devices (or even the included mouse), it works very well.

The Graphire wireless tablet comes with a stylus, stylus holder, two button scroll mouse, and recharging cable. Wacom's technology doesn't require a battery in the stylus, so it's very light weight and easy to use. In addition to being pressure sensitive (with applicable programs like Photoshop), the stylus and the tablet itself both have two programmable buttons on them which can be configured with Wacom's System Preference Pane.

For best results with Inkwell, try using "mouse mode" and turning "mouse acceleration" off. Also, make sure to download and install the newest drivers from Wacom as the ones included on the CD have problems with lag time.

• By Wacom.
• buy
• photo
• screenshot
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• Cepstral Text-to-Speech

• 4
• demo
• 1/8/2007

Do you enjoy text-to-speech, but are tired of the built in Mac OS X voices? Cepstral has ten US English voices available for download as well as UK English, Italian, Canadian French, German, and Americas Spanish. After installing, they appear in the speech System Preference pane alongside the traditional voices.

The quality of the voices is comparable to the best Apple provided voices, and some of them such as Callie, William, and David may be superior. Cepstral also includes a command line utility called "swift" which allows you to synthesize voice directly into an audio file. For example, swift -n Callie -f review.txt -o cepstral.wav produced this sample file. The demo voices vocally ask you to register before speaking your text but are still fun to play with.

• By Cepstral.
• download
• voice demos
• screenshot
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• AppKiDo

• 0.961
• freeware
• 1/1/2007

AppKiDo is a handy documentation browsing tool for Cocoa software developers which relies on the built in Apple developer documentation. Although the program allows browsing by class hierarchy, the most useful feature is the easy to use search and the option to display all instance or class methods in the same list for a given class. For example, looking at NSMutableDictionary this way also shows the methods for NSDictionary, and NSObject.

Unfortunately, the browser doesn't remember your position on the page when hitting the back or forward buttons, and the keyboard navigation could be improved. Still, AppKiDo is a nice fast alternative to browsing the web by hand or using PDF documentation. If you're a Cocoa developer, check it out! If you're not a Cocoa developer, perhaps you should become one. Happy New Year!

• By Andy Lee.
• download
• screenshot
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