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There any number of reasons you might want to record what you can hear from your Mac’s speakers, grab that radio show, record that Skype conversation or capture audio for a screen cast. The sublime interface adds makes it a joy to use.
Continue reading → Piezo The Refreshingly Elegant and Feature Packed Sound Recording App
Rumours have been abound for weeks that a new version of the ever popular Video Lan Client or VLC was due significant upgrade for the Mac and here it is, ready for download in all its 64-bit goodness.
Alongside being a 64-bit binary this is a major update featuring a completely redesigned user interface, full-screen support Lion and experimental support for Blu Ray discs.
Continue reading → Video Lan Client 2.0 is out. Sports new look and features
During the office clearout, i.e listing things on eBay, we needed a way to ensure we had the right information for listings. The internet doesn’t always make things clear and so when we stubmled upon Mactracker we had to mention it here.
Continue reading → Mactracker : A very handy detailed Mac / Apple History App
It might be just a little late but Batman, Arkham Asylum has hit the mac store. This was one of my favourite games on the PC and hooked me in for hours so it’s nice to see it hit the Mac.
[pullquote_left]It’s a cracking game but why can’t we get it for the steam price of 9.99?[/pullquote_left]Priced at 27.99 (at the time of writing) the game comes in at 8.5gb in size so those with download caps might want to keep an eye on their limits. As one person in the comments points out you can get the same game for the PC for ONLY 9.99.
Continue reading → Batman Arkham Asylum Now Available On The App Store
A new version of the ever popular chat client Adium has been relased today via an automatic update and it looks like it’s bug fixing time.
Mentioned in the list of bugs to be fixed is the poor MSN file transfer and the facebook chat issue.
Fixes contained are…
Fixed a case of unfavourable wording in the German localisation. (#15393)
As always we are testing this and looking forward to seeing if MSN file transfers will work in Adium again.
Sometimes the simplest of tasks can just be a major pain in the ass. Posting a screen shot from your desktop and posting on forum involves enough steps to warrant not bothering at times. Normally it’s a case of
Capture Screen
Ftp Image or goto website, upload image and then grab the image link grab link
In steps TinyGrab 2.0 with a premise to make all this simple. Using a simple keyboard combination, TinyGrab performs the capture and upload in one easy step. All the images are accessible shared as part of a social interaction webpage where comments can be left. So it’s not quite a Capture, Upload, Link to blog tool but a different take on sharing screen captures.
TinyGrab resides in the menu bar waiting for either a combination press or a manual choice of capturing a screen area and after creating your account, putting in details to the app, you are ready to start screen capturing. With the screen capture you are limited to use defined areas so you can’t grab a complete window by clicking on it unlike the built in Grab application on IOS.
Once you’ve captured part of the desktop you get the chance to name your snapshot, add a description and upload to your TinyGrab account. You can upload to your own FTP server as well as the default TinyGrab servers.
It’s as simple as that, hitting save brings a nice upload bar underneath the TinyGrab icon showing you the upload status which blends in with the desktop feeling.
Accessing your grabs
Once uploaded your grabs are situated in your web control panel. There is a delay from upload to items being showing the control panel view which, I presume, is down to some pre processing for the thumbnails. Pictures and collection management is best summed up a simplified Google Picasa experience.
Screen grabs and manual uploads are shared in a social context rather than a hotlink to the image itself. For example http://grab.by/aDRg takes you to a view of the picture alongside the ability to enter comments as well. Comments can only be left if you have a pro version of the software. As you can see by the url, links are shortened for a Twitter friendly length.
Those looking for simplified upload and share on blog features are going to be disappointed at this point in the review. Sharing your photo’s to the outside word is apparent from the outset but as mentioned earlier you can upload to your own servers if you wish.
“You can use TinyGrab to host images for your blog through hotlinking. Please be aware though that TinyGrab is intended for simple screenshot sharing, not as an image host/alternative to save your site’s server bill. We ask kindly that you do not abuse this feature, if you do you may find your account and service terminated.”
Stability Issues?
The developers themselves have noted some stability issues and these are blatantly apparent unfortunately. It “could” just be my Lion setup but never have I experienced app crashes, high cpu usage and then complete network connection take-down at times on this sort of level. None the less it remained stable enough at times to get a feel for the program.
Overall
I had hoped this would be more aimed toward bloggers in general with the ability to hotlink to images and such. A previous favorite of mine, Imagewell, became all bloaty and TinyGrab fills the niche area of capture and upload with ease.
If you take the bugs and performance issues at times, Tinygrab is a great tool for simple screen capturing, uploading and has great potential to come.
Windows users are used to having plenty of easy to access tools to show then what’s going under hte hood of their system. The Mac on the other hand has tools but requires some knowledge to get to these nuggets of information, such as knowing what process is sucking your processors dry etc.
Continue reading → adnx CheckUp – Scan your mac performance at a glance
It seems that the Gmail update for the iPhone has had some unexpected repercussions, breaking the Mailtab Desktop client.
Oddly enough, the application still plays a notification noise when mail is received.
It’s not the first time that Mailtab has faced this issue BUT and I have to stress BUT they are normally very quick to find a solution for this program.
As always we will keep you updated.
UPDATE
Well we sent Mailtab an e-mail and got an immediate reply.
This is an issue with Gmail’s abuse systems. We are working with google to get a solution in place soon.
Update 2 – 1st July
Seems the fixing fairies have done their job well and it’s now back up and running. Although it looked broken it seems that clicking the Home Tab at the bottom right of the app refreshed “stuff” and we’re back!
Aspyr Media has posted on its blog that it will be bringing the long-awaited Duke Nukem sequel, titled Duke Nukem Forever, to the Mac. Known for its legendary development period, the game finally arrived on PC and consoles recently, and unfortunately, it didn’t turn out very well, earning generally mediocre reviews across the board
Still, this is worth adding to your games collection as a sequel has already been announced. This is another sign that the mac is gaining traction as an alternative games platform.
Aspyr’s version will be out in August, and it’s offering a 10% discount on pre-orders right now. I can’t promise it’ll be any good, but if you want to at least see what the final version of Duke Nukem Forever looks like running on your Mac, there you go.
There’s still no word of any version of the game coming to iOS — we had spotted the App Store mentioned in that legal agreement a while back, but for all we know, that could just have been for the soundboard released recently. After the reviews on DNF, it’s hard to think the Duke franchise will recover, but you never know — if some enterprising developer wants to make a top-down dual-stick Duke shooter for Apple’s mobile devices, we can’t say we’d be adverse to the prospect.
No doubt like most I like some music in the background whilst I go about my daily business. This means I normally resort to firing of iTunes and selecting a radio station from there but it seems just a little bit big and cumbersome to have such a huge program lying in the background doing not a lot.
Enter Radium, which I confess I only recently found out about in the Freelance Mac App Bundle we are doing on our main front-page so I decided to give it a go
Continue reading → Review : Radium, a slim, menu bar based internet radio player