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.
Continue reading »

Tags: export, Flickr, iPhoto, photos, plug-in, review, Software

A few months ago when I was stumbling around with what to use for my e-mail system, I stumbled across a website promoting an application called Mailplane. Mailplane is a dedicated Mac OS X application designed to provide a new way for you to connect to and interact with the web-based Gmail client and help it feel more integrated with your desktop. Being a Gmail user myself, although a Gmail user who currently relies on POP access to use it, I waited a few months to receive my beta invite and gave it a try.
Continue reading »

Tags: email, Gmail, invites, plug-in, review, Software, Web 2.0, web browsing

WriteRoom is a very interesting application that’s based on the very simple idea that when you’re working on getting a document done, your computer can be very distracting. It seeks to rectify this issue by creating a full-screen writing area reminiscent of the commandline computers of the good ole days, where you can focus on just what you’re writing about free from any distraction. In fact, just to give it the ultimate test, I’m writing this review in WriteRoom right now.
Continue reading »

Tags: full screen, Mac, plug-in, review, Software, text editing

If you’re a podcaster, there’s three stages of producing a podcast: recording, editing, and distribution. There’s a number of ways to record, edit, and distribute podcasts, but when it comes to distribution, you can’t get much better than a WordPress blog and the PodPress plugin.

Believe it or not, a WordPress blog is all you need to generate a feed for a podcast, because when it comes to distribution, all that you really need is the feed. (Wow, I’m a poet and I didn’t even realize it.) However, what if you want a way for visitors who come to you website to listen to episodes? How do you deal with those iTunes RSS tags in the feed? And is there a way to make it easier to add the enclosure to the feed? Enter PodPress.
Continue reading »

Tags: feed, iTunes, plug-in, podcasting, PodPress, review, Software, WordPress