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Oculus - Webcam utility software Pick of the Week
Oculus iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
So you want to become world famous and run your own web cam? You have the FireWire camera and the OS X box to serve the images from, but what next? Using Oculus, the process couldn't be much simpler.

Oculus is a well written application that takes input from a camera and allows you to add captions, control how often images are snapped, and then uploads them to a file server of your choice. Oculus will not help you use a camera that is currently unsupported in OS X, but if you have a working camera, Oculus makes it ridiculously easy to create your own webcam. There are a number of settings you can control, including the ability to rotate captions randomly from a pre-defined set, define "on" and "off" times, and set various image quality options.

At only $20.00, Oculus is well worth the money if you have aspirations for webcam greatness!
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  • Currently 2.33 / 5
  You rated: 4 / 5 (9 votes cast)
 
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SharePoints - OS 9 style file sharing Pick of the Week
SharePoints iconThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
SharePoints is a preference panel that brings back one of OS 9's nicer features - the ability to easily share any folder on your hard drive. OS X has a built-in shared folder, but this may not be sufficient for everyone. In my case, we have our CDs ripped to an external hard drive that I wanted to share to my wife's computer. Using SharePoints, the process is trivial.

You could use NetInfo Manager to accomplish the same result, of course, but SharePoints puts a nicer interface on the process while removing the chance that you'll accidentally do something bad while working in NetInfo Manager.
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  • Currently 2.00 / 5
  You rated: 3 / 5 (9 votes cast)
 
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SNAX - A Finder replacement Pick of the Week
snax iconThe macosxhints Rating:
7 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
SNAX is a file browser for OS X written in Cocoa. That's its brief description. It actually does much more than that. Do you miss folder labels from OS 9? You can get them back by running SNAX. Do you want easily customizable command key shortcuts? Run SNAX. Do you hate the OS X Finder? You can use SNAX as a replacement (see this hint).

It's hard to cover everything SNAX does in a brief review like this, but download it and give it a look. There are a lot of features that make SNAX a worthy competitor for consideration as a replacement to the OS X Finder.
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  • Currently 1.83 / 5
  You rated: 3 / 5 (12 votes cast)
 
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AquaTint - Aqua-ize your graphics Pick of the Week
AquaTint iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
AquaTint is a small utility that lets you take any 32-bit alpha-channel image and apply a number of Aqua effects to it. You can change the hue, saturation, and brightness, as well as add drop shadows, scale the image, and control the alpha channel transparency. It's somewhat hard to describe in text, but very easy to see when you actually use the program, as the settings are all done with sliders. There's also an extensive online manual that explains exactly how to create the starting image in GraphicConverter.

As an example of what the program can do, the "lights" in the ratings bar in these Pick of the Week entries were both created in AquaTint. First the green light was created, and then a couple of sliders were moved to create the dimmed out gray button.

If you like the Aqua look and want to make it easy to create, check out AquaTint.
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  • Currently 1.38 / 5
  You rated: 2 / 5 (8 votes cast)
 
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OmniWeb - A Cocoa web browser Pick of the Week
OmniWeb iconThe macosxhints Rating:
7 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
Developed in OS X's native Cocoa environment, OmniWeb benefits from Cocoa features such as a customizable toolbar, spell checker, and services menu awareness. It also presents amazingly good looking web pages with its nicely anti-aliased fonts.

The Omni Group has been around since the days of NEXT (much of which is in the foundation of OS X), and had some of the first OS X applications available. OmniWeb is a continually evolving product and gets better and better with each iteration. If and when they add some form of tabbed browsing, I'll have to make a tough choice between Omni and Mozilla!
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  • Currently 1.14 / 5
  You rated: 1 / 5 (7 votes cast)
 
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TinkerTool - Hall of Fame App Pick of the Week
TinkerTool iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
In the beginning (of OS X), users had to use the command line to apply various system tweaks. Then came TinkerTool. This simple preference pane allows you to easily tweak things like the zoom rectangle effect, showing hidden and system files in the Finder, disabling arrows on aliases, using transparent icons in the dock, adding a new minimization effect to the dock, adding double scroll arrows to scrollbars, and a number of other such features.

For putting an easy-to-use face on these command line tweaks, TinkerTool earns a spot in the Hall of Fame.
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  • Currently 1.93 / 5
  You rated: 2 / 5 (15 votes cast)
 
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GraphicConverter - Hall of Fame App Pick of the Week
GraphicConverter iconThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
Do you have a graphic image in some format that you need in some other format? Then you probably need GraphicConverter. Its list of supported formats is way too long to list here, but it can handle just about anything you throw at it. You can also use GraphicConverter to create animated GIFs and do basic image editing.

The real power, though, comes when you need to convert hundreds of images and do something to them at the same time. For example, convert them all to grayscale while reducing their size to 640x480 and applying a sharpen filter. In its batch mode (registered users only), GraphicConverter can make this a simple drag and drop operation.

I use Photoshop Elements when I need to create a graphic from scratch, but I still spend a fair bit of time with GraphicConverter for managing my existing collection of images and web graphics. The ability to handle a huge number of iamge formats and its powerful batch processing mode have earned GraphicConverter a spot in the Hall of Fame.
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  • Currently 1.33 / 5
  You rated: 1 / 5 (12 votes cast)
 
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DesktopCalendar - Hall of Fame App Pick of the Week
DesktopCalendar iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
DesktopCalendar is a very simple application. All it does is place a floating calendar on your desktop. The calendar is fully configurable, including degree of transparency and size and color of the various fonts. I used these features to create a very small, unobtrusive yet visible calendar which I can see while working in 99% of the OS X apps that I use regularly (I keep it on the far right side of my screen, and it's seldom obscured by windows).

iCal, Entourage, and Palm are all much more robust calendar solutions, but there's something about this small simple program that does only one job and does it well that I really like ... hence its spot in the Hall of Fame.
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  • Currently 1.57 / 5
  You rated: 4 / 5 (14 votes cast)
 
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Mozilla - Hall of Fame App Pick of the Week
Mozilla iconThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
Mozilla is the open-source basis of the commercial Netscape browser, but there are a couple good reasons to pick it over Netscape. First, Mozilla allows you to easily block images (ads) from any server you wish as well as eliminating those unrequested pop-up windows (ads) that can make browsing so annoying. Mozilla is also a "thinner" package than Netscape, as it doesn't include things like Netscape Radio and an instant messenger client.

But the number one reason why Mozilla is in the Hall of Fame is its creative tabbed browsing feature. Normally when you visit a large number of websites during a browsing session, you wind up with a number of open windows on the screen. In Mozilla, you can choose to have only one window with a number of tabs across the top for each site. Using this feature, you can open links on the current page in new "background" tabs, so you can finish what you're reading before exploring the related material. Think of an Excel workbook with spreadsheet tabs across the bottom of its screen and you've got the concept down.

Is Mozilla perfect? Of course not (I don't think there's a perfect OS X browser yet). But it's fast, free, customizable, stable, open source, and it works on the vast majority of websites I visit, and it has those awesome tabs ... all of which is enough to earn Mozilla a spot in the Hall of Fame.
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  • Currently 1.40 / 5
  You rated: 1 / 5 (10 votes cast)
 
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DragThing - Hall of Fame App Pick of the Week
DragThing iconThe macosxhints Rating:
10 of 10
[0 to 10 lights; 10 = perfect!]
DragThing is one of a number of "launcher" programs for OS X, but calling it just a launcher doesn't fully cover everything it can do. The basic premise is that you create any number of multi-tabbed docks that each hold icons for your favorite applications, documents, and web sites. A double-click on any dock cell launches the selected item. In addition to user-defined docks, DragThing can display a dock containing all running processes (making it very easy to switch applications), as well as a dock containing all of your hard drives, mounted servers, and CD/DVD media.

You can also use DragThing to put the trash can on the desktop and assign hot keys for various activities. You can have it bring all windows of an application forward when you switch, hide other apps when switching, includ a trash can on its process dock, and any one of hundreds of other minor tweakable settings. In addition, docks can now be made to slide out of the side of the screen in a drawer-like manner, and you have full control over customizing the look and behavior of each dock.

I've tried most of the available launchers, and at the end of the day, I keep returning to DragThing. It's easy to understand and configure, and yet offers a ton of power under the hood for those willing to dig around a little bit.
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  • Currently 1.82 / 5
  You rated: 1 / 5 (17 votes cast)
 
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