With Leopard, Apple has finally made Font Book a good enough default font manager for the Mac. Everything from auto activation to error correction and managing your fonts in different collections is available in Font Book. Here’s a brief run down on what Font Book can do for you. [Ed note: In case you haven’t even noticed its existence yet, it’s right there in your Applications folder. Duh.]

Organising your Fonts
We all have those times when we freak out on fonts. [Ed note: OK, maybe not *all*, but I’m sure at least some of you have experienced *font mania* every once in a while.] Hitting site after site, we amass a huge number of fonts over time. And when it comes time to search for one particular font in that huge collection, we rue our poor font management skills.

But if you use a Mac, you’re lucky, because OS X can handle a lot of fonts with ease. And with Font Book, the basics of font organisation are taken care of for you. Font Book automatically makes fixed width and web-friendly categories, and if you install Microsoft Office for Mac, a separate category is made for that as well. However, you do need to go a little further then this to achieve true font management nirvana. 

The first thing you need to do is create a bunch of categories that bring meaning to your fonts. Let’s start with a Fancy category. You could use the default Fun category for this as well. Grab all those swirly, non-conventional fonts and dump them in that category. You can then safely turn it off to save you a whole lot of resources. Remember, every time you select the Type tool in Photoshop, it renders previews of all available fonts. And the more fonts you have, the slower it will get.

Next, you need a Foreign language category. Chinese, Arabic, and any other non-English fonts you have can be added to this one. And then turn the whole thing off. If you do need to turn on one of those fonts, you can do so without having to turn on the entire category. If you come across an Arabic website, it will show you ‘???’ instead of the Arabic type. Of course, leave those fonts on if you can read Arabic in the first place. You will be surprised by how many foreign language fonts reside in your library. I found 56 typefaces myself, and I’m the sort who never even manages to find his own socks. 

Use your imagination with creating categories. In addition to the default ones, I’ve created categories for my favourite Sans Serif and Serif fonts, a category for Ornamental type and another one for Cursive type. This allows me to quickly choose fonts in any Cocoa application by bringing up the Fonts panel (Command+T). Unfortunately, the Fonts panel will not show up in Photoshop due to its Carbon code.

Remember, though, that turning fonts off is much better than deleting them entirely. Fonts hardly use up any disk space and turning them off is as good as their not existing in your fonts panel at all. Deleting fonts will, in all probability, come back to haunt you in your typographic dreams (and no, I do not have dreams about typography—oh, who am I kidding, I’m a nerd). 

Don’t scamper away just yet, there’s more after the jump… Continue Reading »

Widescreen monitors have taken the market by storm in the last couple of years. Apple’s entire lineup is widescreen and almost every monitor being sold these days is a widescreen one. So why is Apple Mail still designed to work better with monitors sporting a standard aspect ratio?

Thankfully, the WideMail plugin, developed by Dane Harnett, solves that problem, and brilliantly at that. WideMail not only moves your message viewer to the side but introduces another interface element that formats your message headers in a special “WideMail” column. What you are left with is a clean three column layout that makes full use of your widescreen monitor. 

WideMail also comes with a separate preference pane so that you can customise the whole look to your liking. In the General preferences, you can adjust the spacing between the message cells, have them use alternate colours, and add grids lines to them. You can also quickly move your message viewer back to the bottom, its original place, if you feel like. 

The formatting pane allows you to customise the way the WideMail Column is shown. You can remove elements like date and subject, and even adjust the spacing using one of the many little devices in the cloud. And just so you know, the default settings for all this is configured just right so you don’t even have to customise anything. This guy is certainly taking tips from Apple!

Remember, though, that once you install the plugin, you need to enable the WideMail Column and disable the other columns. To do that, you’ll have to right click on the column bar (immediately above your messages) and deselect the columns like Subject, Date, and Sender, and enable the “WideMail Column”. 

What’s more? You could combine this view with the threaded conversations tip I mentioned earlier to make your entire inbox a sleek and organised place for all your conversations.

The plugin, at version 0.5.1, is a free download and requires Leopard for (who uses Tiger anyway?). If you do use it on a regular basis, consider donating something as your token of appreciation and to support the continued development of the project.

First, it was NetShare, and then it was Podcaster. Now it’s MailWrangler by Angelo DiNardi (via Daring Fireball). The application, like MailPlane for Mac OS X, allows you to log into several Gmail accounts simultaneously and use Google’s iPhone optimised web interface to browse through your email. It’s basically a version of MobileSafari that can only open Gmail accounts. And, clearly, it’s of great use to anyone who has several Gmail accounts and needs the starring and conversation features of the web version. Furthermore, it sounds like the best way to let someone else check their Gmail account on your iPhone without messing with any of your own settings.

Angelo submitted his application for App Store approval, only to be met with a rude rejection letter six months after the event:

Your application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion.

Huh? Really? The three applications (Mail, MailWrangler, and Safari) have three separate icons with three different names. Each application has a clearly different purpose—Mail is a POP3/IMAP client for accessing your email from any service provider, MailWrangler exists solely to open Gmail accounts, and Safari is an Internet browser that can be used to visit any website at all. And this is coming from the company that has sanctioned more than ten flashlight apps (iTunes link) and an innumerable quantity of to-do applications (iTunes link) for the iPhone.

It’s like saying that you cannot write a Baseball game for the device because an application already exists for tracking real world Baseball matches, and the coexistence of both on the same iPhone might confuse users. How stupid does Apple think its customers are anyway? I’m pretty sure that if someone is wise enough to be able to launch the App Store and download an application, they’re capable of processing the difference in functionalities of two applications. Read on for more… Continue Reading »

In an announcement we already knew was coming, Adobe has unveiled the feature list of its CS4 products. The fourth version of the suite furthers the integration between all the individual products it contains and tightens up the interface for each one of them. It also brings along a lot of new features and improvements to existing ones.

For Mac users, at least, the interface now fits in nicely with Leopard. The tabbed window support in most of the CS4 applications is a welcome change. Switching between applications is now greatly enhanced, with consistent file format support across applications. Adobe has also changed the icons of the applications. What previously used to be white text on a coloured square is now black text on a coloured square! Yes, we know, totally revolutionary, right?

As for the Mac specific features, the applications now support Multi-touch guestures such as pinching and panning on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. You can also drag the entire application to a second monitor, something that was a tedious process involving moving each palette (which would then refuse to dock at the edges) individually to the secondary monitor in CS3. That tame little introduction out of the way, let us now take a look at the meatier offerings of each member of CS4 in more detail.

Continue Reading »

VLC, the popular media player, has been updated to 0.9.2, and brings with it a host of new features—a new UI, fullscreen controller, and simplified settings and dialogs—most of which were already present in the 0.8.6b ‘Leopard’ version.

What’s new?

Here are some highlight of the changes:

I noticed some improvements here and there, like how it behaves while switching to full screen mode, faster and smoother seeking (still no frame preview while doing so though), and better meta data editing options. This version might not bring about any noticeable changes but is worth the update for the small improvements and bug fixes nevertheless.

Everyone and their mother-in-law must have downloaded and reviewed Google Chrome browser by now, except Mac & Linux users. While we wait for the gypsies at Google to release a native version, the folks at Codeweavers have ported it over to Mac and Linux already using their CrossOver emulation technology (yeah, I know, WINE Is Not an Emulator, but I’m not exactly sure what to call it instead). They’re calling it CrossOver Chromium (why such a short name, people!).

Google Chrome on Mac OS X 

This should be used for experimental purposes only and CrossOver developers declare that it’s only “proof of concept, for fun, and to showcase what Wine can do”. CrossOver Chromium is available as a DMG file for free (unlike CrossOver Games or CrossOver Office). All you Safari and Firefox users, feel free to give this a test run and comment here on how good or bad this thing is. I, on the other hand, am completely satisfied with Safari and wouldn’t approach this one with a ten-foot stick.

The App Store is a mixed bag of beans. It is awesome in almost every way, and yet can give that feeling of restriction that only Apple is known for. And one of those stinging feelings is that there is no trialware in the App Store. You can look at a screenshot or two, read a whole bunch of crooked unmoderated reviews, and then you have no choice but to go ahead and buy the application. Now in most cases, this is almost acceptable. But one area that I noticed was a problem, was with file managers.

Everyone wants to know which is the best file manager on the iPhone. There’s FileMagnet ($5), MobileFinder ($2), Files ($7), DataCase ($7) and then some. Lucky for you, here’s a review of four of the main apps, and we shall strive to come to a conclusion as to which one is the best. (There is also the really expensive TouchFS ($15) and super complex Caravan ($3) which you might want to check out, which I won’t include in this review.)

I will further divide this shootout into three categories so you can choose what aspect is most important to you. And lest you don’t notice, there’s plenty of linked screenshots in the review. Continue Reading »

iTunes 8 was launched during Apple’s special music event yesterday. I was very excited to try it out and downloaded it the first thing this morning. Here are my initial Impressions and review of the new features in iTunes 8.

The biggest feature touted at the keynote is Genius Playlists. The idea is that iTunes will automatically generate playlists, based on the current song, with other songs that ‘go well together’. iTunes will initially index all your music and send it back to Apple’s servers where a database based on your playlists, play counts, likes, and dislikes will be built. It then matches this with other users’ databases and brings back all that genius information, updating it from time to time. You need to have an iTunes Store account to use the Genius features (one more reason to have an iTS account). All this is well and good in theory, but how does it perform in the real world? Continue Reading »

I’m very wary of the superlatives affixed to software titles. We have StuffIt “Deluxe”, Windows Vista “Ultimate” (ultimate indeed!), Nero “Professional” and Rammohan “Banaaraswaale”! Generally, they all tend to be bloated and resource hogs (except that last one there, perhaps). I prefer applications which are light on the system and cut out the extra fat wherever possible.

The Unarchiver, a small archive unpacker program in Mac OS X, abides by the textbook definition of just such an application. It can open ZIP, RAR, TAR, 7-zip, LhA and StuffIt files as well as those with some other extensions I’ve never even heard of before. It has never failed me so far and has successfully unpacked every single archive I’ve thrown at it till date.

I always like clean and uncluttered interfaces and this one sports one that is simple yet efficient. It exits automatically after the extraction is done and the RAM consumed while unpacking is less than 10 MB. You can also have it automatically delete archives after files have been extracted from them.

The Unarchiver is a must have for every Mac OS X user out there who has to deal with archives other than those of the ZIP variety. After all, why spend $80 on a “deluxe” app when you can get the same basic functionality for free and cut out all the unwanted bloat!

After almost nine months with Coda 1.1, which was basically a Leopard compatibility update, Panic has dropped the bomb with a bevy of new features, some nice improvements, and a ton of bug fixes, with the v1.5 update to Coda.

What is Coda? Well, it’s not much—it’s only like the benchmark of awesomely designed mac applications! And having won the 2007 Apple Design Award for best user experience is no joke either. Coda is, as the developers like to call it, a one-window web development application. It combines a site manager, FTP client, code window, world class CSS editor, live preview, and a couple of other things that I won’t even go into. Read up on Shawn Blanc’s review of Coda to know more about what it is capable of. Moving on…

The update brings along integration with Subversion, which allows for team work and a host of other site management features. The Find/Replace feature has been given the royal treatment, which brings it on par with Dreamweaver. Coda can now find/replace text across multiple files throughout a ‘site’ or any local folders. 

And along with Coda’s own set of Books, you can now add your own books into the interface along with cover art. Clips have also been improved, with support for groups as well as exporting options. There’s a whole log of bug fixes and improvements which you can see for yourself in the release notes.

Coda v1.5 is be a free updade for existing users but the price for a new license has gone up to $99, up from $79. If you are into web development and haven’t used Coda, you are missing out on something truly amazing.