In yesterday’s Leopard Feature Presentation, I did my best to review Dashboard, even though it’s one of those features that I haven’t really taken part of. However, Leopard introduces another thing for Dashboard, but this new feature is aimed towards developers. It’s called Dashcode, and it’s an integrated development environment specifically for Dashboard widgets. Although it’s great for anyone who knows all of the JavaScript necessary for making a custom widget, it’s also advertised as being easy enough for anyone to make a widget without writing any lines of code. Yesterday, right after I finished my Leopard Feature Presentation on Dashboard, I opened up Dashcode to give it a whirl. Let’s take a look at how it went.
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Tags: application, Dashboard, Dashcode, development, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Macworld, review, Software, widgets, XCode

One of the “wow” factors that made for a great demo during the two times that Apple demoed Leopard in front of crowds at Moscone Center was the brand new Photo Booth effects, and my, they looked pretty awesome. Now that they’re in our hands though, a bit more of the wariness behind them starts to come out.

Although the new Photo Booth effects are shared by both Photo Booth and iChat in Leopard, I’ll be reviewing them here, since they make up pretty much 85% of what’s new in Photo Booth. As such, my iChat review (later this month) will not include as much detail about these effects and instead opt to review the other new features. And so, get the cameras ready and your best smile on, because the Leopard Feature Presentation for Photo Booth starts in 3 (beep) 2 (beep) 1 (beep)…
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Tags: application, backdrops, effects, features, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Photo Booth, review, snapshots, Video

SubEthaEdit by TheCodingMonkeys has to be my favorite text editor on the Mac (which is one reason why I love Coda, because it has the Subetha Engine built right in). Not only is it a very nice, bloat-free text editor with powerful capabilities for syntax highlighting, etc., SubEthaEdit is the first and the best tool for multi-user document collaboration. Yep, even before Google Documents existed, SubEthaEdit was there. Although with Leopard coming out, which now has screen sharing capability built-into iChat, the specialness of an application like SEE may seem diminished, but it’s still going to be a great tool for those Mac users who don’t upgrade to Leopard right away.

SubEthaEdit 3.0 was released today, and it brings along some nice new features. Although the new version is completely compatible with Tiger, it also packs a number of Leopard features, including being fully Quick Look-compatible, making it possible to view SubEthaEdit documents in Finder Cover Flow, Quick Look, and share them in iChat Theater (albeit read-only). SEE 3.0 can also save files in a special “SubEthaEdit Text” format which retains data such as changes by different collaborators and who collaborated on what, etc. It also has a better view for tracking one’s connections, and a statistics window to view various stats on who has contributed what, etc.

They have a movie detailing all the new features in SubEthaEdit 3.0, although it’s a little hard to understand the guy, it’s still an interesting watch. My congrats to the TheCodingMonkeys and hats off for designing such excellent software.

Tags: application, collaboration, Connections, editing, Mac OS X Leopard, sharing, Software, SubEthaEdit, text, TheCodingMonkeys