Recently in Cool Apps Category

Well, it's no secret; BumpTop is out in the wild for Mac! For me at least, it has replaced Finder for the short term if not for the long run.

At first look, wow. BumpTop is great. And you'd be right. It completely replaces finder on your mac, and integrates all the functionality of it. you can still access all the features of finder; QuickLook, spaces, and any other features that you rely on. They all work. Opening a folder opens a Finder window on top of everything. Amazing. However, there are a few great features that I'd like to highlight for everyone.

The first of these features that makes BumpTop so much better than Finder is the ability to stack items on top of each other. You can select a whole pile of items, and turn them into a stack, just as you would on a regular desk.

In the Pro version, you can use the two-finger scrolling on your trackpad to flip through the stacks. If you don't have pro, you can double click the stacks and they will open in a grid view that looks very similar to the grid view in Mac OS when you open a dock stack. Soo much better than finder, for so many reasons.

Another great feature that I'd like to highlight is the ability to control the size of items on your desktop. you can click on an item, and grow or shrink it depending on its importance to you, just as bigger documents would be on a real desk. You can grow and shrink them to make them suit your needs.

The last thing that I'd like to highlight is the walls that you have to put things on. You can double click on any of the four walls to move the camera view to that wall, on which you can pin stuff, like a real wall. This gives you that extra bit of desktop real estate when ever you need it.

The one feature that I would love to see built in is the ability to span multiple monitors. It is not currently there, but I'm sure it will appear in the future. I highly recommend BumpTop for mac and windows, even with its $30 price tag.

All for Now!

To all of those who follow the development news on Tweetie, the twitter application for Mac and iPhone, you will know that it is scheduled for a new release of the iPhone and Mac version. According to @tweetie on twitter, the version for iPhone was submitted for review yesterday. I am hoping for many new features on the iPhone version, including Push notification and landscape keyboarding. I don't know if push would be enabled, but that would be cool. Also, it would be cool if it allowed for Vide, Image, and GPS location posting all within the same app. Currently, the only way to do this is with a combination of TweetDeck and 12seconds.tv. this works well, but is a hassle.

For the Mac version, I hope for the ability to run the app in the background and not much else. I love the app right now, and really wouldn't change much.

Once these come out, I'll review them. Until then, you'll all just have to wait.

Tweetie,Product Reviews

Well, today I will be reviewing a cool little blogging platform called Ecto. Ecto is a desktop blogging application that I will be using for a while, i think. It has hookups in it to MovableType, Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, and most other popular platforms.

It has hookups in it also to connect to iLife media, like iTunes songs, iPhoto pictures, and iMovie projects.

When you add a new blog, it automatically detects the hook points from the blog URL that you provide. You then just enter in your password and are ready to go.

It lets you select Tags, categories, keywords, and anything else essential to blogging. You can enable and disable trackbacks, comments, and other things directly from the application.

You can create a summary, get a word count, and even save a draft directly to your hard drive without uploading it to the server. All of the data is stored locally before publishing. That is a feature worth getting.

Application: Ecto

Price: $19.95, 21 day trial.

Where to get it: http://illumineX.com/ecto/

Well, I just have to talk about Doppelganger, but Jonnie Hallman. All it is is a small application that downloads videos from Youtube. It is very similar to Tube TV, but it is only a little window that you drag youtube URL's to. It downloads them to a folder of your choosing, and id written in AIR, so it runs on any platform. I use it, and so should you!