Lorelle VanFossen, blogger extraordinaire, celebrated the 2nd anniversary of WordPress.com and her blog by inviting many guest bloggers to post various articles about blogging during the month of August. (The upcoming month of September will feature many non-stop WordPress/blogging tips.) She invited me to write a few articles, and I must say I really enjoyed writing them. The first one was Ways to Build and Retain Your Podcast Audience, posted almost two weeks ago, and the second one was Blogging and Social Networking as a Teenager, which was just posted this morning. I highly recommend that you check out these articles, which I am very proud of!

Tags: article, Blogging, guest blogging, Lorelle VanFossen, podcasting, social networking, teenagers

I’ve always said that I’m not a fan of computer games. Well, that’s kind of a half-truth, although I am against the majority of the computer games out there. However, I’m a little more favorable towards some of the games out there that help you unwind and actually take advantage of that big glob in your head called your brain. I’ve already reviewed one or two of these this past month, and today will throw out one more.

I may not be a big fan of Windows, but I do know that it comes with a pretty nice Solitaire game built-in. Chess was all that Apple seemed to be able to muster up for Mac OS X, which is why before I went to Los Angeles this past weekend, I decided to see if I could Google up a good and free solitaire application for Mac OS X. My result was a nifty little app called Solitaire XL.

Solitaire XL is the same Klondike game you’re used to on Windows and many other Solitaire applications, and it doesn’t come with any other solitaire games to play. Still, it’s a pretty nice game to play. It has some nice 3D OpenGL-based effects during game play, and the way those cards flip really gives a nice, real feeling to the game. The application itself only has one brushed metal window which is where the deck/discard pile sits–the rest of the cards float above whatever is behind it. However, the window is the way that you can reposition the game on the screen, and if Solitaire XL is not your foremost application, the rest of the game will hide itself until you bring Solitaire XL to the front again.

However, Solitaire XL does have some available options, such as allowing you to choose between two animation styles (it calls them “Stretch” and “Cut”), change the backside design of the card, set a background to the game if you want, set the animation speed, and even turn on a variation of the game that only turns over one card in the discard pile, instead of the traditional three.

Solitaire XL also can keep score of the game. I didn’t know there was any kind of “score” for Klondike, but the way Solitaire XL keeps score is it adds nine points any time you add a card to the set of suits up at the top (anyone know a name for those stacks?), and subtracts one point each time you draw from the deck. It can then send your scores to its online high-score database, although it has had some difficulty loading properly for me. The only slight detraction from the app is the small unobtrusive ad that pops up when you quit the game, but again, this is freeware.

All in all, if you’re looking for a decent Klondike Solitaire game for Mac OS X, Solitaire XL is a pretty good OS X adaptation of the classic card game available for download at no cost. Now if only someone could figure out a way to help me win it more often.

Final Rating:

Tags: games, Klondike, Mac, review, Software, solitaire

Something that a number of Mac bloggers have been doing recently is sharing what they have up in their menubars, and so I thought that I might as well share mine as well. So, without further ado, here is mine:

From left to right (I’ve linked to reviews where applicable):
CoverSutra - Really nice iTunes controller that I love.
Quicksilver - Without a doubt, the swiss army knife of Mac OS X.
Skitch - One heck of an application for snapping, annotating, and sharing images.
iClip - That nice thing for keeping a clipboard history.
Twitterrific - The driving force behind my addiction to Twitter.
Wakoopa Tracker - Sitting there, quietly monitoring what apps I’m using.
TextExpander - If I forget a snippet or want to quickly add a new one, the menu item is there to help me.
International - Quick access to the Special Characters palette.
AirPort - Because I’ve got to know when I can go wireless.
Clock - The small version because it’s good enough, saves menu bar space, and because I wear a watch all the time anyway.
Battery - How much juice do I have? Am I getting thirsty?
Spotlight - It’s slow and I really don’t use it. I know there’s a way to scrap it, I’ve done it before, but I’m just too lazy to mess around with my precious system in that way.

I realize that my blog has been slumping–apparently I haven’t done a non-review article in a week! I’ll be catching up soon, I hope…

Tags: Mac, menubar, Personal, services, Software

One of the most overblown software/hardware categories these days are iTunes controllers: there’s thousands of them. I’ve already reviewed my favorite, but thought that I’d give mention to another one that I’ve tried.

Like I said, there’s a whole bunch of iTunes controllers out there, but one of the founding members of the iTunes Controller category was Synergy, which puts three little controls in your menubar for controlling iTunes, and also includes a number of other nice and interesting features. The downside to it though: it costs money. However, there’s another app out there which is fairly similar, called ByteController.

ByteController is actually fairly similar to Synergy: its main function, like Synergy, is to put the same previous/play-pause/next buttons into the menubar. It’s also skinnable, and comes with a number of skins which you can choose from to determine how the buttons appear in the menubar. Another Synergy feature here, it also lets you set hotkeys for controlling your iTunes from your keyboard, and ByteController includes Growl support. But what it doesn’t borrow from Synergy is its price tag: ByteController is 100% freeware.

All-in-all, ByteController works as advertised and pretty well, although I wish that it had an option to disable Growl notifications, as I’ve already got a few other things that gives me Growl notifications for my music. I ended up ditching it when I got the more powerful (but more costly) CoverSutra, but for someone looking for a free, simple way to control their iTunes experience from afar, ByteController is a very economical way to go.

Final Rating:

Tags: iTunes, Mac, menubar, music, review, Software, Synergy

Despite Apple trying to catch up to modern times with their fabled .Mac Web Gallery, there’s already a leader in sharing photos with friends on the internet–and one that’s a whole lot cheaper than .Mac. We all know it as Flickr, the site where anyone can upload their photos and share it with other contacts on the web–one of the websites most recognized with Web 2.0. And for a $25/year pro account (which I recently indulged myself with), you can upload as many photos you want, with no upload or bandwidth limits–that’s for a quarter of a price of .Mac and a lot more features. But, when you have a Pro account, that means that you’re going to want to upload all of your photos to Flickr as easily as possible. If you use a Mac, there’s a number of tools out there to do that (because everyone knows that uploading it through the web browser is boring and tedious), including one that Flickr themselves maintains, but the easiest and best tool, by far, has to be the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto.
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Tags: export, Flickr, iPhoto, photos, plug-in, review, Software

One of iPhoto’s more basic “taken for granted” features is its ability to make a slideshow of your photos. Over time, iPhoto has gained a few more transitions to make the slideshows look a bit more interesting, but the idea hasn’t really changed: you see one photo full screen, followed by a transition to the next photo full screen, then the next one, etc. But what if you want more from your slideshows, something that would really wow the audience, or maybe something that would make them think that you’ve gone WAY over the top? Enter PhotoPresenter.
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Tags: Apple Design Award, effects, iPhoto, photos, presentations, review, slideshow, Software

Most experienced internet users will tell you that if you really want to harness the power and purpose of RSS newsfeeds, little browser add-ons like Safari’s RSS viewer, Internet Explorer’s RSS viewer, and even Firefox’s live bookmarks aren’t the way to cut it. The real purpose of RSS is to serve as a “lite” version of a website’s regularly-updated (syndicated) content so that feed readers can regularly check the RSS feed for updates while being quick and light on bandwidth. To really harness the power of RSS newsfeeds, you need a dedicated feed reader.

NewsGator’s NetNewsWire seems to be the most recognized feed reader for Mac OS X. I personally haven’t had the opportunity to use it since the older NetNewsWire version 2, which was pretty clunky. NetNewsWire 3 looks a bit better, and in fact, many of the new features and much of the new interface in NetNewsWire 3 comes very much from my personal feed reader of choice, NewsFire.
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Tags: feed, Mac, News, review, RSS, Software, subscribe

There’s a lot of corners and niches around the Web 2.0, meaning that your online world is split up among all these places. Mugshot is a website that aggregates your data from most of the major Web 2.0 services out there and display it on a single page for anyone to see, however it’s pretty apparent that the site was designed by someone who couldn’t come up with an original idea of their own.
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Tags: friends, identities, network, photos, review, services, Web 2.0

Now, I can’t call myself a very good Tetris player. Actually, I don’t call myself much of a game player at all, but there’s nothing wrong with trying out a game of Tetris every now and then to see how good your reflexes are, and then to get you depressed at how horrible your reflexes are. The downside of Tetris is that it’s hard to find a good game of Tetris out there for OS X that doesn’t cost money. And maybe that’s because the best game of Tetris that doesn’t cost money isn’t Tetris at all.

Meet Quinn. It’s played exactly the same way and with all the same rules as Tetris, but it’s not Tetris, mostly to avoid trademark violation. And now I’ve typed Tetris in this post nine times. I’m probably in trouble. Nevertheless, Quinn is a really nice Tetris-style game application with a really nice user interface. It also includes many additional features, including “Tournament” (for playing with two players at a time), and network play, which allows you to play with any other Quinn user on your Bonjour network. Quinn also includes a number of piece styles and backgrounds, and you can download more. And Quinn has an online highscores database which you can submit your scores to once you lose your game.

Oh, and did I mention Quinn is absolutely FREE???

If you’re looking for a really nice application to play a game of Tetris, either by yourself or with a friend, check out Quinn, and kiss all of your productivity goodbye.

Final Rating:

Tags: games, Mac, review, scores, Software, Tetris

Probably one of the more interesting debates of our time would be which category of software application has the most competitors doing the same thing. I probably wouldn’t want to be the one to place a bet on that debate, but I’m pretty sure that the category of “iTunes Controller” must rank near the top of the list. I’ve tried many different iTunes controllers for Mac OS X for the past few years, and during this month of reviews, I’ll be reviewing two (the other review will be next Thursday). However, today’s review focuses on my personal favorite iTunes controller, Sophiestication’s CoverSutra.
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Tags: album artwork, audio, controller, iTunes, review, Software