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June 2009
- The InfoManager for June 29, 2009... This week: $90M Text Spam Suit * The Dark Side of Social Networking * Twin 1.1 and Sequence 2.1 * Intelligent Touchwall Debuts * Macgamestore.com Offer New Clue Game * 6 Ways to Correctly Delete Applications * Installing Wine on the Mac * AutoCad on Mac * Find My Phone Works * Even Faster Web Sites * Illustrator 3D Folding * New Version of Artlandia SymmetryWorks * Quotes ... and more
- $90M Text Spam Suit In an unprecedented ruling, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has announced that publishing giant Simon & Schuster could be on the hook for as much as $90 million for sending unwanted text messages to tens of thousands of people.
- The Dark Side of Social Networking When it comes to social networking, it's not what you know, or even who you know, it's who knows you. ZATZ Publishing, in partnership with FrontLine Security Magazine has released David Gewirtz's latest Special Report, The Dark Side of Social Networking
- Even Faster Web Sites Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site's performance -- another important title for web publishers
- Intelligent Touchwall Debuts The next generation of multi-touch surface computing was introduced by Schematic as the Information Hub of Cannes Lions International Ad Festival. This technology is awesome and offers a new world of high-definition, interactive information delivery. Schematic's intelligent, multi-user "Touchwall" is one to watch!
- Illustrator 3D Folding Strata Enfold 3D CX allows users to create professional folded 3D designs within Adobe Illustrator. Users can utilise linked Photoshop graphics applied to 2D Illustrator artwork, define die-cut lines and folding scores, and then see it in 3D within Illustrator.
- New Version of Artlandia SymmetryWorks If you use Adobe Illustrator, and have a taste for patterns, the new SymmetryWorks 5 is for you -- it significantly simplifies the creation of repeat patterns the popular pattern design plug-in for Adobe Illustrator
- iPhone Development Opportunities As the world of iPhone plug-ins continues to expand, it represents viable and lucrative career opportunities for computer savvy developers. EDUmobile has launched an iPhone Online Course to meet the shortage of information resources and training. Candidates earn certification on completion and an option to co-publish their first app on the App Store and keep 80% of the revenues.
- Beautiful Security Beautiful Security, edited by Andy Oram and John Viega, today's security experts describe bold and extraordinary methods used to secure computer systems in the face of ever-increasing threats.
- Spam and Phishing Update This edition of spam and phishing update features articles: * Spam king' faces criminal charges, again * Symantec Reports Rise in Toolkits Used for Phishing Attacks in May 2009 * 'Group A' spear-phishing attackers re-emerge * Twitter verifies spam attacks on networks increases * Fight Back Against Phishing * PayPal tips, video and advice to fight phishing ... and more.
- GraphicDesignerToolbox If you use GraphicDesignerToolbox, then you know its powers. Now this powerful Mac OS X graphics editor just got an upgrade and the next version is free. Perfect for web designers that need to compose seamless tileable backgrounds, trim pixels, prepare thumbnails and add shadows, plus much more. Special focus for this update has been on increasing realism of textures, by adding building blocks for making fractal noise such as irregular cracks, structured patterns, random strokes and traditional IFS fractals.
- Invoicing on the Mac OS X Involer, the home and small business invoicing application has been updated and now offers many new features including a new 'Reports' feature, that allows users to create custom reports of their invoicing history, perfect for keeping track of company sales, and earnings. Praised for being one of the easiest to use invoicing applications, Involer is gradually transforming into one of the top players in the Mac invoicing field.
- Keep Your Word upgraded Keep Your Word lets you build your own dictionary, classifying and grouping the terms exactly how you want to, while helping you to learn the longest list of words thanks to its different exercise modes. Keep Your Word supports all the character sets that your Mac supports, so you can write any word in the world.
- Becker Mac Bundles If you've used the Macintosh for more than just a few years, but haven't heard the name "Stephen Becker" -- then you must have been living under a rock. Stephen has been a widely known and highly trusted name in the shareware arena since the very beginning of the Mac. Now, he and his company MacEase Software have combined forces with the premier shareware supermarket, Kagi, to bring you TheMacBundles.com and unprecedented value to all Mac users.
- Android Application Development Android Application Development - Programming with the Google SDK by Rick Rogers, John Lombardo, Zigurd Mednieks, and Blake Meike, introduces this programming environment -- including the operating system and SDK
- BoinxTV wins Apple Design Award 2009 Boinx Software plus TheCodingMonkeys and their live production software BoinxTV have been honored with the Apple Design Award 2009. The Apple Design Awards recognize technical excellence, innovation, and outstanding achievement in iPhone and Mac software development. BoinxTV turns a Mac into a TV studio to record stunning studio shows, podcasts, sports events, concerts, interviews, sermons, lectures, seminars and more, using your Mac and multiple cameras.
- Top Level Domains - ICANN pushes forward ICANN and internet domain news and updates -- The Second Interim Report of the Board Review Working Group has been presented and ICANN appears to be moving forward to offer huge range of new top level domains -- allow almost any string of letters to be used for a global gTLD! This and other news from the world of internet DNS and Domains
- Nikon D700 Guide Learn your new camera RIGHT! Mastering the Nikon D700 provides a wealth of information and professional insights for owners of this powerful new camera. Each chapter explores the features and capabilities of the D700 in detail
- Copyright Fees Changing If you're a publisher, writer, author, artist or other creative who uses copyright in your pursuits then you'll want to take notice of new upcoming U.S. Copyright Office changes. New fees are scheduled to take effect on Aug. 1, 2009.
- Shareware publishing power Do you market a shareware product? Ergonis Software has produced SharewarePublisher a new software submission tool and assistant for Mac OS X -- makes submitting software applications to leading software listing sites and repositories incredibly easy. SharewarePublisher ships with almost 200 pre-configured shareware sites, with carefully hand-tuned ratings/priorities.
- FontAgent now Bundles Open Type Fonts Insider Software and Bitstream have partnered to bring a bundle of professional OpenType fonts from Bitstream's extensive professional Open Type font collection to purchasers of FontAgent Pro Plus for Macintosh and Windows. The collection contains well-defined kerning pairs, full Character Sets,and reliable metadata, and includes book and text fonts, creative and display fonts, script and handwriting fonts, mono-width fonts and symbol and dingbat fonts.
- Sandvox Website Creator Updated There's a new version of Sandvox, the award-winning web design software for Mac OS X. A showcase of website designs for Sandvox is available, featuring dozens of commercial and free designs available for installation over and above the fifty designs included in the program.
- DATAform for InDesign CS4 and QuarkXPress 8 The DATAform module for both InDesign CS4 and QuarkXPress 8 now provides a bi-directional connection between a user's database and the layout application. Any InDesign or QuarkXPress boxes and all of their properties can be defined within simple ASCII-text -- awesome desktop publishing power!
- Contact grabber Mac OS X WhoPaste is a contact grabber utility for Mac OS X that supports creating contacts in Google Contacts, Entourage, or the Mac OS X Address Book. Version 1.1 extends the power of WhoPaste to spreadsheets allowing the extraction of multiple contacts in a single keystroke.
- Voice-To-Text for iPhone QuickVoice PRO Recorder 1.1 is a popular recorder featuring high tech Voice-to-Text emailing. QuickVoice's Voice-to-Text technology is powered by SpinVox, the world's largest commercial speech platform. QuickVoice Pro users will be able to use their iPhones to record short voice messages, which are automatically converted to perfectly formatted text emails by SpinVox and sent to the email inbox of the user's choice.
- Keynote's elegant new themes Who would have thought such elegance would come from Lithuania??? Keynote Zone has launched their new theme resource specifically for Apple's Keynote. With a passion for new possibilities, KZ designers combined their creative energy to come up with a package of professionally designed ready-to-use themes for Apple's Keynote application. Five new Keynote themes are now available for sale in standard or HD formats at brand new Keynote Zone site.
- End Boring Presentations We've written about FotoMagico before. Now, FotoMagico 3 raises the bar for all storytelling software for digital photographers. FotoMagico 3 introduces many new features to create professional slideshows in pristine quality. FotoMagico 3 makes it easy to mix photos with HD movies as provided by many recent DSLRs. With support for multiple audio tracks and an integrated audio recorder, every show can be enhanced with soundtrack, audio effects and narration.
- Hip Effects for Final Cut Pro CrumplePop's Freemeo is a stylish new HD title effects package for Final Cut Pro. With Freemeo, you can instantly create trendy pink, yellow, blue, and white titles and lower thirds without leaving Final Cut Pro. Freemeo is a suite of Final Cut Pro Master Templates, and works with most standard HD resolutions, including 1920x1080 and 1280x720. Freemeo can be downloaded for free on the CrumplePop web site.
- Auto-serialization for InDesign Zevrix Solutions has updated their InPreflight Pro, the quality control, packaging automation and file info reporting solution for Adobe InDesign. InPreflight quickly gathers extensive information about document fonts, colors and links and lets users instantly locate potential problems according to preflight presets. The new version allows system administrators to automatically serialize InPreflight Pro for large-scale distribution.
- New iWeb Themes iWebTemplate has added a bunch of new iWeb themes for anyone who uses Apple's Website building application, iWeb. iWeb Themes 4.0 includes five new great themes: Blossoms, Couple, Eyes Fire, Garden and Theatre. Each iWeb theme has ten templates instead of the ordinary eight. The new release extends iWebTemplate's iWeb themes collection up to eighty one themes. Each iWeb template incorporates a number of different graphic elements which can be easily removed, moved and changed.
- Ultimate Theme for RapidWeaver If you use RapidWeaver, check out TW002 r4, a new Ultimate Theme for RapidWeaver 4. seyDoggy has transformed this once limited theme into a versatile RapidWeaver template capable of fitting the needs of just about any industry. TW002 is ExtraContent enabled, featuring width options, split navigation, comprehensive color control, custom headers, header effects, font control, and RWmultitool ready.
May 2009
- Trojan Horses - Fact or Fiction A Trojan Horse is a destructive program that masquerades as a harmless application. Unlike viruses, Trojan Horses do not replicate themselves, but they can be just as destructive -- the most dangerous examples of a Trojan is a program that introduces viruses into your computer. Pass this article along to others, especially those who use Microsoft products or Microsoft operating systems.
- Power Grids at risk At last, some people are beginning to wake up and recognize the real and present danger of cyber attacks on the nation's power grid. Ten times greater risk than the flu, with a thenth of the media coverage. Now, lawmakers are seeking to tighten Cyber Regulation to avoid hacker disruption of critical networks.
- iMovie '09 & iDVD: The Missing Manual It's a real pain digging through Apple's help screens. You get a tidbit here, then go elsewhere for the next tidbit -- it's help obviously written by an engineer who doesn't actually use the programs. But the Missing Manual concept gives you both the tidbits, and essential task oriented, step by step tutorials that get you off and running in no time!
- iWork '09: The Missing Manual This book quickly guides you through everything you need to know about the Pages word-processor, the Numbers spreadsheet, and the Keynote presentation program that Al Gore and Steve Jobs made famous. Unlike those guys, you've got real work to do -- and you can't rely on the help files. This is the manual you'll need.
- Final Cut Pro London SuperMeet The Final Cut Pro User Group Network has announced the First Annual London SuperMeet will be held in the Great Hall at the Kensington Conference and Event Centre in London, England on Thursday, June 25, 2009
- BEWARE: Gmail Accounts Hacked Eagle Investigative Services has discovered that the Open Resource free proxy server Tor, is vastly insecure and can be used by hackers to steal passwords and other information used in phishing attacks. The Atlanta private investigators are thankful they run everything on Apple Macs so the damage was able to be quickly contained.
- FMSmallBusiness (FMSB) updated FileMaker has grown from a sleek, elegantly simple but powerful database generator into a monster application that befuttles even Stanford computer science honor grads. So, you'll need a little help. FMSmallBusiness is a FileMaker based database great for managing the contacts, calendars, invoice, and more for small businesses -- and now includes twenty-five updates
- PopChar Reverse Searching for Fonts Thousands of Mac users have for years used PopChar for finding and inserting special characters. PopChar now allows reverse searching, i.e., searching for fonts that contain a particular character -- even jump directly to the marked character in a favored font.
- holographic card responds to tilting iPhone HoloSnaps for iPhone and iPod touch add a new angle to your photos -- create a holographic card that responds to tilting your iPhone or iPod touch! Use the built-in camera to take photos within HoloSnaps or select existing photos stored on the device. Tap on a card to have the robotic arm lift it out of the case for you. Yet another cute iPhone app to impress your friends with!
- Personal Expense Tracking Suponix has introduced BudgetCare personal expense tracking application for iPhone, making it easy to track everyday personal expenses -- developed for anyone who spends money each day. BudgetCare stands out with simplicity, ease of use and professional GUI designed in native iPhone style.
- Get Framed for iPhone and iPod Touch here comes another great app for iPhone and iPod Touch where you crop, scale, enhance, and frame any photo in your Photo Gallery. You get 96 themed frames in twelve categories designed specifically to spice up your iPhone experience -- so Get Framed
- 9,000 USBs at the Dry Cleaners 9,000 USBs at the Dry Cleaners -- Data hung out to dry as 9,000 USBs left in Dry Cleaners -- a survey released by Texas based data security experts Credant Technologies is a wake-up call to keep your eye on your stuff!
- Public-Domain Status of Early Sound Recordings A Library of Congress report indicates that the miscellany of state laws protecting pre-1972 sound recordings will extend copyright protection until 2067. Retro copyright protection could cause some problems in digitally produced "period" or "retro" music clips.
- Photoshop CS4 Photographer's Handbook Photoshop CS4 Photographer's Handbook a clear and effective workflow for editing photographs in Photoshop CS4 by Stephen Laskevitch, Luminous Works and Adobe Certified Instructor
- PDF into Web Site with new publishing platform Here's a novel idea -- PDF into Web Site with new publishing platform simple, self-service solution -- PageTurnPro transforms PDFs into online publications in five minutes. Be sure to check out the demos, and turn the pages with your mouse!
April 2009
- Review: iWork 09 The Missing Manual User group editor Hartley Jackson reviews a new Missing Manual book -- iWork 09 The Missing Manual -- Hartley says: "Josh Clark has written this book to show us how to do what we want to do in iWork."
- Master SQL Fundamentals Updated for the latest database management systems -- including MySQL 6.0, Oracle 11g, and Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 -- Beaulieu's guide will get you up and running with SQL quickly.
- GraphicConverter Upgraded We've enjoyed the benefits of owning GraphicConverter for over a decade. This famous and popular image editing and conversion utility for Mac OS X has now been enhanced and upgraded with support for bio-formats
- High-Speed scanning for Mac ExactScan 2 for Mac OS X adds an OCR engine and barcode recognition to create searchable PDF documents on-the-fly.
- Scanning with a digital camera If you can take a picture of something with your camera, you don't need to buy a scanner. Prizmo corrects lens distortion and perspective, it can scan documents of all sizes, including custom portrait and landscape documents indoor and outdoor photographs. This is a handy application -- especially for iPhone users
- Recover lost photos and tunes When you lose your photos because of a fouled memory stick or card, you feel like you've lost part of your life. Actually, you have -- chances are, you'll never get that moment back to take those shots again. If this disaster happens to you, hopefully you'll remember this alert about Advanced Photo Recovery for Mac OS X.
- A Light Panel In Your Pocket Here's a novel idea for the photographers and cinematographers of the world -- using your iPhone as a photo light! It's a natural! LightSource is the first iPhone and iPod Touch application that transforms the device into a light panel with user selectable light temperatures and types.
- Mac Firewall Protection Cyber crime has recently begun targeting Mac iTunes and Apple iPhones for phishing and other forms of "soft" identity theft. Unlike Windows users who get slammed several hundred times a day -- until now, on a Mac, you had to actively participate in your own demise. Who knows how long it will be before Mac users represent an attractive target for cyber crime malware attacks. ProteMac NetMine is a network firewall for Mac OS X which intercepts all network activity traveling from Your Mac and from every an application of Your Mac.
- Hand-Drawn HD Effects for Final Cut Pro Here's a pretty cool idea for creatives -- CrumplePop, a set of high-quality, hand-made, pen-and-ink elements that can be easily dropped directly onto the Final Cut Pro timeline. With CrumplePop, you can easily drag and drop high-quality hand-drawn elements into any HD or SD project. Whether you are producing for film, broadcast, or video podcasts, CrumplePop gives gives you access to the highly sought-after hand-drawn visual style.
- MacBook Air External Battery/Charger Remember the days when we had all kinds of schemes to get from one coast to the other on a single laptop battery charge? Then, with more powerful Laptops, we resorted to taking along an extra battery. QuickerTek's extended life battery for all models of the Apple MacBook Air can give you six to ten more hours of additional battery power, well beyond the power of the built-in battery. This is the only product that charges the internal battery of the MacBook Air while in use.
- Interactive charts for Mac friedEgg Touch is an interactive data analysis tool for Mac OS X with interactive features to simplify the analysis of tables of potentially complicated data. Charts can easily be created and changed by just dragging data columns to the chart dimensions. Then you interact with data by directly manipulating the chart.
- Money accounting gets better for Mac Leopard You may recall our reviews of Money personal and small-business accounting application some time ago -- we liked its looks and works. Well, Jumsoft has updated Money again, adding some new and user friendly options along with language localizations, and the invoice creation tool, Invoice Templates Editor.
- PhotographyTips for iPhone We often say now "we've seen it all" with some of these iPhone plug-ins and apps, but this just about takes the cake. Cheese cake, that is. PhotographyTips has released the first guide for posing female models for iPhone users. What will they think of next!!!
- The Page Director Ad Layout System The Page Director Ad Layout System is an automated page-planning solution, optimized for compatibility with Adobe Creative Suite 4, and QuarkXPress 8.0. It now includes a convenient new print designer, which allows users to design and print custom ad dummies, resulting in printouts that conform to each publication's specific requirements.
- NABShow FCPUG SuperBooth The FCPUG Network "SuperBooth", part of NABShow 2009, with free immersive sessions with Final Cut Studio, Adobe and digital filmmaking Gurus who will answer questions, demo user-driven production and postproduction workflows with Final Cut Studio Tuesday, April 21, 2009
- Graphic Designer Toolbox Targeted at professional web designers and artists, GraphicDesignerToolbox is a unique and powerful graphics editor for generating textures, composing logos, photo manipulation, text effects and web graphics. It features adjustable building blocks which allow for extensive tweaking and re-use, of modular visual components.
- MacSnapper Creates Tutorials MacSnapper was developed specifically for creating step-by-step tutorials, manuals, kiosks, user guides or even personal notes. MacSnapper will organize everything necessary to describe a project. Screenshots may be taken directly from the application, or images may be easily imported.
- QuickVoice iPhone Recorder How long have we waited for a good voice recorder for iPhone? QuickVoice seems to be the best out of all the rest. It provides its users with a convenient way of sending voice email directly from their iPhones.
- InPreflight Pro and Studio Zevrix Solutions is back with powerful applications for Adobe InDesign. This time they present InPreflight, its quality control, packaging automation and preflight reporting solution for Adobe InDesign.
- PhotoUpLink 1.2 for iPhoto Developer Mark Morris has announced PhotoUpLink 1.2 for iPhoto. This iPhoto plugin enables S/FTP, ODBC, and Office export, and now includes the ability to export over WiFi to any iPhone or iPod Touch running PhotoUpLink.
- Vector Drawing for OS X Chromatic Bytes, LLC today announces the immediate availability of ZeusDraw 1.3.3, an update to its Mac OS X vector drawing program. ZeusDraw sports a fluid, graceful interface, great brushes and a host of other features.
- Your Book as Your Business Card What is 6" by 9," usually weighs roughly one pound, and is giving an increasing number of business leaders an advantage over the competition? A book. 'The book as a business card' has added a new and powerful tool for marketing
- The Nikon D90 Companion Here's a full-on photography class that covers everything including technical matters and exposure theory, composition theory, and how to find images and expand your visual sense. However, unlike a regular photography class, this book is built specifically around the D90, which means every concept is written about in terms of the D90's controls and features.
- Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference A tough economy can be a great opportunity to increase skill sets and make valuable contacts -- like the 3rd annual Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference, to be held April 27-30, 2009, at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco.
- Color Efex Pro for Lightroom Color Efex Pro is now compatible with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom -- photographic filters for retouching and creative enhancements. The update is free to current owners of Color Efex Pro 3.0. (Site features some really helpful video training!)
- Mac Disk Space Cleaner Nothing worse than a dirty Mac. Sponge combines three techniques to reclaim disk space: removing applications, finding duplicates, and finding large files and directories - greater disk space savings by tracking down more installed applications and finding duplicates faster. Go ahead... clean it up!
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