A free online backup solution
We’ve all heard the warnings about the need to back up our data — if your Mac dies, you lose a heckuva lot of work. Admittedly, my own efforts at backups were kinda feeble before Time Machine came along. It’s so simple, there’s really no excuse for not using it.
But if you’re really hardcore about backups, you realize that even this is not enough. What if your house burns down? That external hard drive will go up in smoke with everything else. The solution, they say, is an offsite backup.
A number of services have sprung up recently that let you do this for a monthly fee. But as it turns out, the company that hosts thriftmac throws in online file storage as an extra. I haven’t used it much, because it requires remembering to upload a bunch of files on a regular basis.
So I was intrigued when I came across a newish program called Twin. I say “newish” because it appears to be a repackaging of an older program called Persistence. It caught my fancy because it does automatic online backups for you. It’s not quite the no-brainer that Time Machine is, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, the demo version of Twin kept throwing up errors and I wasn’t able to get it to work. The developers are apparently checking into this, but in the meantime I decided to search for an alternative. There are many backup programs available for the Mac, but precious few designed specifically for online backups.
Finally, in true thriftmac fashion, I came across a nifty little freeware item called Mathusalem. (That’s the French word for Methuselah, an oldster mentioned in the Bible who is said to have lived 969 years.) The program is actually a preference pane, and it works like a charm.
Open it up and create a backup. As your backup destination, you have the option of choosing a server complete with host, path, username and password. You could just run the backup right away, but better still is the ability to set up a schedule — such as when you login, when both source and destination disk become available, every set amount of hours, once a month, or on selected days of the week.
A bevy of advanced settings includes the ability to exclude certain files and directories.
Best of all, it worked perfectly on the first try.
Unfortunately, though, there is a catch. As of March 1, 2009, development of Mathusalem has ceased. And to make matters worse, the developer links to Persistence, which, as mentioned, has morphed into Twin. What an odyssey this has turned out to be.
The saving grace in all this is that Mathusalem is open source, with code freely available. If we’re lucky, another developer will pick up the baton and ensure Mathusalem remains and free and viable for years to come. In the meantime — what the hay — it does work.
Posted Sunday, May 24, 2009 in Reviews
Macworld loves FileZilla
Macworld has declared FileZilla the best there is when it comes to an FTP client for the Mac. As you may know, I prefer Cyberduck — but I’ve been warming up to FileZilla lately. The two-pane interface — similar to the much-loved Transmit — is especially handy.
Posted Monday, April 27, 2009 in Reviews
MacHeist: the good, the bad, the ho hum
The MacHeist bundle wasn’t exactly freeware, but for anyone interested in thrift, it certainly was a great deal. I found it irresistible. As always in a bundle such as this, there are going to be some apps you like, some you don’t like and some that are just ho hum. Here’s my list:
The Good
The Hit List: I’ve tried various organizers and to-do lists in the past and have always wound up abandoning them. In the end it always seemed easier to just put sticky note on the computer. The Hit List, though, is super easy to start using right away. And if you’re so inclined, there are a lot a features you can learn later. It’s earned a place of honour in the dock. We’ll see how long it lasts.
Little Snapper: Imagine iTunes for screenshots. It has a built-in browser that allows you to take screenshots of web pages. And you can store all your images in various categories and smart lists of your own creation. I never thought I’d find a use for such a thing, but there’s a lot of potential here.
The World of Goo: This is a wonderful game that’s almost impossible to describe. You’re basically building structures to accomplish a goal, and having a lot of fun along the way. It’s a great way to pass the time and build your brain power.
Cro-Mag Rally: Just about anything Brian Greenstone does is good, and this racing game set in caveman times is no exception. It has great graphics and plenty of powerups and obstacles to keep things interesting. Steering takes some getting used to — you can easily find yourself off-course.
Picturesque: Create some wonderful special effects for your photos, including perspective, reflection, shadow, curve and stroke. You can also crop and save presets. It does what it does well, but you might find it limited.
Times: This one just barely makes it into the The Good. I like newsreaders of all kinds, and this one is kinda cool because it displays the news similar to a newspaper layout. The question remains: Is it innovative? Or just a gimmick?
The Bad
Espresso: This is a text editor used mainly for creating the code used for websites. One of its big selling points is a live preview of how your site looks as you add new code. Unfortunately this feature doesn’t work unless you use a workaround that you can find by searching the user forum. I wonder how many people will bother to do this, or simply move on to one of the other capable text editors out there. And this is just one of many complaints. Check the Espresso forums for more. The worst part is the deafening silence from the developers.
The Ho Hum
iSale and PhoneView: Not sure what they do and likely won’t bother to find out.
Acorn: Once you’ve been spoiled by Photoshop, it’s pretty hard to take anything else seriously. It’s nice to have the alternative, though.
Kinemac, WireTap and BoinxTV: I can’t image ever wanting or needing these apps, so I didn’t download them. Maybe I’ll surprise myself some time in the future.
Posted Saturday, April 11, 2009 in Reviews
Monkey Ball for your Mac
Neverball has long been a great freeware game for the Mac, but with the recent upgrade to version 1.5, it has all the polish of an app you’d expect to have to pay for.
Long before Monkey Ball became the rage on the iPhone and iPod touch, Neverball players were able to “tilt” a surface to roll a marble past obstacles, picking up enough coins to open a gateway to the next level. Of course, you don’t physically tilt your Mac the way you would an iPod. Instead, you use a mouse, cursor keys or joystick.
The 3D graphics are gorgeous — but be warned that any small children seeing them will likely want to play. Unfortunately, tilting is quite sensitive, and they will likely find it too difficult. In fact, many adults may find the sensitivity hard to get used to. Hang in there, though, because it’s worth the effort.
We were under the (wrong!) impression that Neverball was no longer being actively developed. But there is a huge list of improvements in this version, and developers and users are discussing ways to make it even better.
Included with the download, by the way, is Neverputt, a simple golf game. You’re playing in a sort of vacuum, so there aren’t any background graphics. But the actual courses are quite interesting and challenging.
Posted Wednesday, February 4, 2009 in Reviews
iPhoto vs. Picasa
Now that Google has released a Mac version of Picasa, is there any reason to keep using Apple’s iPhoto? Picasa has the great advantage of being free — something we can appreciate here at thriftmac because it’s our reason for being. iPhoto comes free with a new Mac, but you have to pay for upgrades. Let’s set aside that niggle, and see how Picasa stacks up against iPhoto.
Organization
When you fire up Picasa for the first time, it asks if you want to import pictures from certain folders where they are normally kept on a Mac, or whether you want to just import everything. I chose the first option, but even so got a ton of stuff I wasn’t expecting.
For example, it brought in every iteration of every logo I’ve ever worked on for a website. That’s the kind of picture browsing capability you might appreciate in Photoshop, but isn’t Picasa supposed to be more about the snapshots you took while on vacation? You can remove folders from Picasa, but it’a bit tedious.
The other thing about the organization of photos in Picasa is that they don’t always follow the same structure you had them in with iPhoto. For example, some vacation pictures from Quebec City were in an appropriately named folder, but others from Victoria were in a few different folders named by date. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to rename the folders. This function was greyed out in the Edit Folder dialogue.
Overall, the organization is disappointing, but if you’re willing to put in the effort, it could be fine-tuned to the way you like it.
Editing
The interface for fixing up pictures is well done and easy to figure out. When you double-click on a picture to make it full-frame, an editing dialogue appears to the left with three tabs — basic fixes, tuning, and effects.
Basic fixes include simple things like cropping and red eye. Or if you really want to go basic, click on I’m Feeling Lucky — an amusing holdover from Google’s search engine. I tried it on one picture, but found it made the picture appear washed out. Maybe I’m just used to fiddling around with things on my own.
Tuning allows you to play with sliders for fill light, highlights, shadows, colour temperature, and a neutral colour picker. You’ll like these if you prefer to have control over your results. Effects include a dozen items such as sepia and sharpening. They generally work as advertised.
Sharing
There are plenty of other features in Picasa — in fact too many to mention. But it should be noted that the program makes it easy to share your photos in various ways. For example, clicking on the email icon will fire up either your email program or Gmail with a message containing the picture of your choice ready to go. Similar services exist for Blogger and of course Picasa’s web albums service, which has already been around for some time on the Mac side.
About that interface
Much has been made in some circles about how the Picasa interface veers away from what we’re used to on the Mac. I had no problems with it, and in fact found it kinda cool in some ways. The scroll bar is especially innovative.
Is it better than iPhoto?
As mothers often say when the kids are lobbying her to say who has the best artwork: “They’re both very nice.” I don’t mean this as a cop-out, but both Picasa and iPhoto have some great features. We really enjoyed using iPhoto create a beautifully designed hard cover book with pictures of the kids as a Mother’s Day gift. iPhoto also lets you send selected pictures by email, but you can choose what size you want and a proper caption is included.
In the end, I’ll stick with iPhoto mainly because I like the way it organizes pictures. Its editing abilities are capable, and it’s sharing capabilities are sufficient for my needs. Having said that, I’m thinking some people might prefer Picasa because of its free web albums service. As far as I know, the only built-in way to do something similar with iPhoto is by using the paid MobileMe service from Apple. Then again, you can get around this by using one of a number of iPhoto plug-ins designed for use with Flickr.
Posted Thursday, January 8, 2009 in Reviews
By request: business cards and labels
We got this request in the mail:
hi pls add business card makers, labelers, and the like. pretty please :) thank you :)
How could we resist?
DesignPro is a freeware app from Avery that helps you design binders, mailing labels, other types of labels, media labels & inserts, photo ID, card products, specialty products such as T-shirts, name badges, business cards, and dividers & tabs. As you might expect, a program that does so much weighs in at a hefty 329 MB — so consider yourself forewarned.
At first glance, DesignPro appears to give a lot of bang for the buck with plenty of templates to choose from. But we would recommend using them as the basis for you own designs if you have any talent in this area, as we found many of the designs provided by Avery to be on the cheesy side. Compare them, for example, with the gorgeous templates found in the iLife suite.
DesignPro gets credit for going the extra mile for Mac users by integrating access to your iPhoto library. There are also libraries of clip art and stock photos, but — again — you should think twice before using them if you want a truly professional look.
It’s worth noting that Avery makes much of the fact that this program is for use with Avery products. In other words, once you’ve designed your labels, they’d love it if you would print them off on the physical Avery labels. Unless we’re mistaken, though, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why you couldn’t use products from a different manufacturer.
Posted Sunday, December 28, 2008 in Reviews
Five days, five free games
Mac Games Arcade is a new freeware interface for downloading hundreds of Mac games and organizing them. The games themselves are not free, but as a promotion for Mac Games Arcade, you can download one game a day — for free — over the next five days. First up is Pangea Arcade, which is free today (Friday). It’s a collection of three games called Nucleus, Warheads, and Firefall, all of which involve blowing up enemies at a frantic pace. Another game, to be announced, will be available on Saturday. I have really enjoyed other Pangea games, such as Bugdom and Otto Matic.
What’s the catch? This is basically an online store similar to iTunes. So you will have to give them your credit card number and other personal information. On the other hand, it was created by the maker of Inside Mac Games and Macgamestore.com, both of which have a good reputation. Also, the developers, such as Pangea, have good reputations. I took the leap of faith.
I have no complaints about the process. The weird part is that once the game is installed, you launch it by clicking on a Play button in Mac Games Arcade — similar to the way you would click on a Play button in iTunes. The actual game wound up being installed in a special Mac Games Arcade folder in the Documents folder — not Applications as you might expect — so you could launch it from there if you prefer. The whole concept can take some getting used to, but if you download and play a lot of games, it might be a good way to keep them organized.
Posted Friday, December 19, 2008 in Reviews
Open vs. Neo
Macworld has a review of OpenOffice 3, which of course has opened the whole can of worms about which is better: OpenOffice or NeoOffice. Fans of NeoOffice seem to think of OpenOffice as an interloper on the Mac scene. A native Mac version has just recently appeared, whereas NeoOffice has been maturing on the Mac for quite some time.
Personally, I’m not a fan of office software in general. I have trouble understanding why text, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings and databases need to be combined into one behemoth. Doesn’t it make more sense to have programs that specialize in each of these areas and do them well? And are only launched when needed?
By creating open source versions of Office, we are in a sense buying into that whole marketing idea from Microsoft that we need to have them all in one, and thus pay more. While I’m glad to see free alternatives, I get the feeling that the best they can do is “good enough,” and that they will never be a true replacement.
Posted Friday, December 12, 2008 in Reviews
Macworld reviews FreeMind
Mind mapping programs — used to plan out projects — can be quite expensive. Luckily, we have the freeware FreeMind as an option. Macworld gives FreeMind a generally good review, but issues a warning about the inelegant interface.
Thankfully, what it lacks in looks, it makes up in ability—especially when you consider that other fully featured programs like Mindjet MindManager fetch $129.
Posted Tuesday, November 25, 2008 in Reviews
Drawing conclusions
First there was Paintbrush, then it was iPaint, and now Vanilla Draw. What’s going on?
Paintbrush is (or was) a simple painting program designed by Mike Schreiber to be similar to Microsoft Paint and MacPaint. It is indeed simple. You can draw lines, make shapes, add text and colour them. It’s not exactly Photoshop, but doesn’t pretend to be.
Paintbrush is open source, which means anyone can download the source code and tweak it, or even use it as the basis for their own program — which is exactly what happened with iPaint. The developer, Danny D, notes that Paintbrush “hasn’t been updated for almost one year and it was time to do something.” After a series of rapid .1 upgrades, iPaint is now at version 2.0. Unfortunately, something broke along the way and it won’t launch. (Or has it gone back to version 1.0? It’s hard to tell . . .)
But lo and behold, along comes Vanilla Draw from Giza Products — which is also based on the Paintbrush open source code. It at least launches. As I write this, I have Paintbrush and Vanilla running at the same time. As far as I can tell, their interfaces and features are pretty much identical.
So what on Earth should you do if you want a good, solid drawing program for free? There’s nothing wrong with any of the programs we’ve mentioned here (that launching problem will likely be fixed soon), but our recommendation is to try DrawIt Lite. It comes from developers dedicated to selling a pro version, so you can be fairly certain they’ll keep it in good running order as a way of encouraging you to upgrade. Or just keep it for free.
Posted Saturday, November 8, 2008 in Reviews
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