QuickCal

If you use iCal on your Mac, this one's for you.  QuickCal is a little app that handles one of those petty annoyances that I have with iCal.  How often have you been doing something on your Mac and you need to enter an appointment on your calendar? You stop whatever you are doing, go to the iCalendar, find the date, open the Add Meeting box, and type in all the details.

QuickCal does all this (and more) in a flash.  Let's say you need to make a calendar entry while you are reading an invitation in your mail.  You can either hit the QuickCal Hot Key (which is user-settable but the default is Shift-Command-C) or click the QuickCal icon in the Dock. A popup window appears and you type your appointment in simple english.

As you type in the black box, the white box below the entry line opens which fills in the calendar data appropriately - even location!  Hit Return and your entry is automatically posted to your calendar.

What's more, QuickCal has built in reminder alarms (user settable again) which mean you don't have to set them manually. QuickCal can also handle To Do lists by starting or ending with 'todo' or entering some Task by Date entry format. All of this for three bucks!  I love it.

Read more on the developer's website here.

Caffeine

Before I can start my day, I need a little caffeine.  I guess the same could be said for my Mac.  Do you find it irritating when the display wants to dim while you are reading a long webpage or while you are watching a video?  Sure, you can hit the space bar or wiggle the mouse but why should you?  You can go to the Systems Preferences to change your Energy settings for your display but this seems like a hassle for just the one thing you are doing at the moment...  and then you have to change them back.

Well, there is another way.  A developer at Lighthead Software has written a great little utility called Caffeine which does the trick.  The utility installs a little cup of coffee on the right side of your top menu bar.  Click it and the empty cup fills with coffee and your Mac is wide awake for... you choose!  You can set it up in the utility's preferences for either minutes, hours, or indefinitely.  No more dimming screen.  No more Systems Preferences diddling - just a period of your Mac being awake.  Best of all, this little application is free either at the developers website here or you can get it at the Mac App store if you have Snow Leopard 10.6.6 installed (do yourself a favor and get the latest OS X upgrade if you don't have it).

Oh, almost forgot.  Unlike real caffeine, this digital caffeine can be neutralized as the click of the coffee cup. No more jitters. Very cool.

Alfred: At Your Service, Sir.

I came across a free app in the newly launched App Store (you do have the latest version of OS X - 10.6.6 don't you? It gives you access to the App Store).  But I digress.  The application I wanted to write about is called Alfred (as in the butler). Having just watched the first set of episodes of Downton Abbey on Masterpiece Theater, I can definitely see the value in having a butler.  Alfred (the app) can't do everything that Carter, the butler of that series, could do, but this Alfred can do a lot. And best of all, Alfred works for free!  It costs nothing to download the app which is still in beta.  You can get it here.

So what does Alfred do?  Alfred is a combination replacement for Spotlight, a super-speedy little application launcher, and a fast route to searching the web.  No more Command-Tab to move around between applications.  No need to go to the Dock or the Applications folder.  Alfred works through a simple search bar which is brought up by hitting a couple of keys that you can set to whatever you like.  The default is Alt-Spacebar.  When you hit that combination, Alfred's search bar pops up.

Now you can start typing any string you like and Alfred will try his best to help.  Want to launch an application?  Type a couple of letters and Alfred will offer suggestions.  For instance, if I wanted to launch EazyDraw, I might type "ed" and Alfred brings back this result:

Notice that I didn't need to tell Alfred that "ed" meant EazyDraw.  Alfred came back with a nice list of items I could have wanted using the string "ed".  He thought the most likely was TextEdit, which is understandable, but his second choice was EazyDraw.  If I wanted to launch EazyDraw, I could either scroll down to that entry on the list and hit Return or I could use the key combination Apple-2 and the application would launch.  Neat, but this is only the beginning.

If I want to find a file, I can simply type "find" followed by the file name or part of the file name and Alfred brings back a list of options.  Say I want to find my resumes on my hard drive.  I type "find resume" and Alfred brings back a neat list as shown:

And this result comes back almost instantaneously.  How about searching the web?  No problem.  Instead of "find", start your search with "google [search term]". Alfred brings up a fresh window of your browser and has already linked to the Google search page with the results returned.  Alfred comes with a long list of pre-built search options including Google Images, Google Mail, Google Docs, Wikipedia, eBay, and quite a few more. 

If you regularly search other locations that are not in the predefined list, you can easily build a new link with a term that makes sense to you.  For instance, I like to look at images at the Library of Congress.  I set up a custom search using the string "LOC [search term]". Alfred goes to the Library of Congress website and brings back a list of all the images found using that search term.

The developers of Alfred have an extension that they sell for a small fee.  I don't think you need it right away but it may prove to be useful as you go forward.  Give Alfred a look.  Good help is hard to find.

EazyDraw

I haven't posted anything here for a while so I thought I would bring you a vector graphics program that I really like.  This one is not 3D like Blender or Sketchup.  It is a 2D program that competes with Adobe Illustrator (the industry standard) at less than one fourth the price.  Illustrator runs about 400 bucks.  This program, EazyDraw is only $90.  Not cheap, I know, but much cheaper than the competition.  There are a number of other low-cost vector graphics programs for the Mac but they don't have nearly the features or the support of EazyDraw.

Here is a screenshot of the desktop with a number of the submenus opened up:

EazyDraw has tool palettes built-in for more than your standard graphics.  It also has technical libraries, math functions, dimensioning capability, and more.  It is fully capable of handling layers and complex blending effects.  You can see more at the website above.

Here's a graphic from their website that shows a water irrigation schematic:

You can also go the other way and do very creative artistic work.  Here's another one from their gallery:

Like any complex package, EazyDraw takes a little getting use to but there is not only good help files in the program but a 300 page manual which you can buy as an extra either as a pdf or as a printed book.  If you want to try EazDraw, you can download the program and use it for two weeks for free.  If you really want to try it, you can pay $20 for a nine-month license which you can then upgrade to a full-license for the difference in price.  

Take a look at EazyDraw if you are looking for a good value.  Of course, if you can get Illustrator for under $100 at student pricing, you might do that instead. 

p.s. EazyDraw's creators are not the same as EasyCrop which I blogged about earlier.  

p.p.s. You might notice in the top graphic the picture I created for my Tech Almanac blog on Rufus Porter's airship.  I basically traced and filled in images of the three airships and then expanded or contracted them to be the same scale.  It wasn't hard at all and it was my first real project with the software.

Free 3D Graphic Packages for the Mac: Part 2

To follow up on my post of a couple of days ago, the second 3D graphics package for the Mac is Blender which is an open-source software project of quite some sophistication.  This software competes with Maya, 3DS Max, and a host of other high-end 3D graphics packages.  The software is complete and doesn't impose any limitations like watermarks or file saving limitations.  And the software is being frequently updated by a very active programming group.  Check out the software Features here.

Here is a static shot from the home webpage Gallery to show some of the capabilities:

Blender is much more than a static package.  It has very extensive animation and rendering capabilities, game generation, and a host of other features.  But be warned, this package, though powerful, will take some time to learn.  The good news is that there is a lot of tutorial material at the Blender website and even more that you can find via Google and YouTube.  There are also books you can buy that offer instruction. 

Blender has a unique interface which is both a plus and a minus.  It doesn't look or act like anything else on the Mac (because it is ported for Windows and Linux, as well).  

I would put this one in the "future reference" category in case the need should ever arise.  

Free 3D Graphics Packages for the Mac: Part 1

Have you seen Avatar in 3D?  Pretty cool...and the movie even had a story.  What more could you ask for?

If the movie inspired a desire to create your own 3D graphics, I have two suggestions; one easier, one harder.  Both free.  The first is Sketchup 7 from our good friends at Google.  I'll talk about the second, Blender, in a later post. Sketchup was originally conceived to be an architectural program and Google bought the start-up company to allow people to easily put buildings into Google Earth.  But Sketchup is capable of much more.  And best of all, it has a fairly intuitive interface and skads of support.  You can download Sketchup here. You want the basic version, not Sketchup 7 Pro which costs 500 bucks.

So what can you do?  Check out the pictures below (both from the Google 3D Warehouse).

Both the Eames chair and the Arc de Triomphe were built with Sketchup.  Believe or not, the Arc was probably simpler to make than the chair.  And if you like something you see in the 3D Warehouse, you can download it and modify it with your own copy of Sketchup.   I did the yard plan for our house (below) in Venice with Sketchup.  You can see it will also do dimensions which can be handy.  This also shows that it can be used for two dimensional drawings as well. Think of it as a great tool for planning furniture arrangements.

Want help figuring out how to use Sketchup?  There is a ton of help and tutorials at the Google site.  In addition, just type in Sketchup Tutorial into YouTube and see what you get.  Check out this one for modeling and old-time radio.

Reading RSS Feeds

If you're like me and like to read blogs and web news sites (or you want to simplify getting my other blog, Technology Almanac), you could use a good RSS reader application.  It is true that you already have some built-in options.  For instance, if you use Gmail, you have Google Reader which is a fairly sophisticated RSS reader.  I think the interface looks cluttered and hard to read, but that is just me.  If you use Mac Mail, you can have your RSS feeds added to your left-hand menu in Mail -  but that only works for a small number of feeds and then it gets cluttered.

Which brings me to my RSS Reader of choice, NetNewsWire from NewsGator.  NetNewsWire is free (always a good start) and has a host of features.  You can organize your feeds into folders and sub-folders.  You get a very clean reading interface.  You get tabbed browsing (just like Safari).  And you can save your favorite feeds into a Clippings file for later referral.

So let's look at the interface below:

If you use Mail, this should look familiar.  Feeds are on the left, the list of new posts from a specific feed are on the top-right, and the text of the post is in the bottom-right.  Tabbed browsing is on the far right.  This is a very clean and intuitive interface to work with. 

NetNewsWire has a built in browser window which means that if you click on a hot link, it will open right up in the Reader.  If you prefer (and this is what I do), you can change that behavior in the NetNewsWire Preferences so that any link is opened in Safari.  This just seems to keep things a little more organized for me but you might have a different experience.

Subscribing and unsubscribing are dead-nuts simple.  You can set up NetNewsWire to be your preferred RSS reader.  To do that, have Safari be the active window, open Preferences, click the RSS tab at the top and set NetNewsWire in the drop down.  See below:

Now, when you click on the RSS button that appears at the right side of the URL bar in Safari, the Subscribe Window from NetNewsWire will automatically open and give you the option of renaming the feed or using the default.  Click Subscribe and you're done.  

Some added bonuses of NewNewsWire is that you can sync all your feeds with Google Reader so that you can still have them when you are on someone else's computer.  And, if you have an iPod Touch or iPhone, there is a free app by the same name that also lets you read them on the those devices.  

There are more features you can read on the NewsGator homepage for NetNewsWire.  Hope you enjoy it.