Archive for category applications

New Free Apps for the Mac

Posted by admin in applications, free, mac on June 16, 2008

Found these free apps the other day when looking for presentation support software.

One is called Desktop Curtain which displays a blank desktop right in front of your cluttered desktop.
Many Tricks · Desktop Curtain-1.jpg

The other application is called Plainview. Plainview is a full screen web browser.
plainview _ software _ the barbarian group-1.jpg

Both are free and both work great. I am the type of user who does not like anything on my desktop but I still leave folders and files there that I am working on. Sometimes I just turn on the Desktop Curtain in order to “forget” about what it is I probably should be working on!

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Great PDF Document Viewer for the Mac: Skim

Posted by admin in PDF, applications, education, mac, school on February 1, 2008

A trend that I am beginning to see more and more of in the graduate classes that I am taking is the lack of textbook purchases that I am having to make. I think that this is wonderful. There were plenty of textbooks from my undergraduate years that cost a ton, yet were rarely used. In the place of textbooks the professors select journal articles or specific chapters from books that the library scans in using an electronic reserve system. The journal articles are typically accessible through the university library subscription service database (ProQuest, EBSCO, JSTOR, etc.) In the past I would go straight to the campus computer lab and print 20-25 page articles out, one at a time.

Such a waste of paper!

Instead of this I have been doing the best I can to utilize Adobe Reader as a way to read the PDF’s and take notes on paper or with a word processor. The new Adobe Reader 8 has some nice highlighting and note taking features. However, with any free software released by a major corporation, it is expected that the consumer pay for more functionality (Adobe Acrobat).

I found a really nice, open source, PDF/Note taker application called Skim.

For a free application there is plenty of functionality. Below is an image I snapped along with some text pointing out the key components of the user interface.

Even when switching to full screen mode the user still has the ability to use all of the markup tools for commenting and taking notes on the content of the document. There are a few easy to remember keyboard shortcuts which helps the user accomplish the task much smoother. Using it today in full screen mode I had a new discovery when I moved my cursor toward the edge of the screen. The notes window pane and the thumbnail window pane would appear, alternating based upon the side of the screen that I moved the cursor towards. I was pleasantly surprised and I feel that this is great for jumping from page to page, or note to note without ever leaving the fullscreen mode.

Overall I am quite pleased with the application, and it serves my educational reading needs! For the Mac user I would suggest it over using Preview or Adobe.

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I have been bit…by a Mac

Posted by admin in applications, mac on November 7, 2007

Well after a two month hiatus from blogging I would like to get back into the swing of things. Sometimes it is hard to not just sit back and absorb the ideas and ponderings of other bloggers and writers. Certainly over the summer I was much better able to keep up with all my RSS reading, but so far this school year I have been slacking. The new house, a rambunctious son, plus doing all I can to support my wife while she chisels away on her thesis has really kept me away from posting more.

Excuses aside. No room for those!

So as I put in the title, we bought our first Mac 2 weeks ago.

The past few months have been brutal with Vista and the more I read about Macs, and all the cool programs, the more we were influenced to take the plunge.

So here are my top 5 favorite Mac apps so far….

1) Quicksilver- it is a free download but is an essential for me for navigating and finding things quickly with only a few keystrokes.

2) Garageband- it just rocks. I plan on producing some podcasts with my students. Already we made an intro. song for some sort of soon to be planned production.

3) NeoOffice- I do not like the Word program for Mac and I am not willing to spend 150 bucks for it. NeoOffice is basically Open Office for Mac. It works beautifully and does everything I need it to do.

4) iWork 08- Keynote has some spiffy features and is a fresh alternative to the drab features of Power Point. Now I just need to find the time to actually create a useful presentation!

5) Skitch- Thanks to John Pederson for the invite. I use this program every single day, regardless if I am publishing to the web. Very easy, quick, and free!

I am still waiting for my copy of Leopard to arrive and I am unsure if I will go ahead with an install right away. I had heard that some programs were not ready for it yet. I am impressed with what I see though!

Two links that certainly helped me find some tools for the Mac, as well as guidance into what freeware was out there….

http://wesley.jot.com/WikiHome/macapps

and

http://web.mac.com/simon_elliott/simon_elliott%40mac.com/Software.html

Also I am slowly building eledtech.com using iWeb, FTP’ing the site folder with Cyberduck to my own web host. I have a Moodle installed on it but I need the time to play around… I wish the day was 36 hours.

How about a picture from the new place, using Skitch.