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!
First off, I have to give a big thanks to the folks over at MacHeist for giving me this great piece of software absolutely free. Thanks guys! Well, WriteRoom is a great little application for writing. It doesn't do anything fancy, it just produces either Rich Text or plain text format. It can save into many different formats, and can integrate well with Word. It provides a simple interface with absolutely no distractions. In fact, when the application is on, you can't even access the dock. It just won't show it. I find it great for writing just about anything, especially documents for school. I highly recommend this app.I am starting a new Youtube videos on How To do things in Creative Suite and or Mac OSX. I'll do any other products as well, however I prefer to stay within the Mac platform. If anyone has any suggestions, then leave a comment letting me know what you want to see. As I said, I'll do anything that you want to see.
The first one in the series should come out next week and be called, "Why iMovie 08 Sucks".
Again, leave some comments and let me know!
All for now!
Well, after visiting the apple store yesterday and picking up a copy of Sow Leopard, I figured that I should give it a try.
When we tried to install it, it asked which disk to put it on. We had an external drive that we wanted to put it on first, and it started the install. It got down to where it was about a quarter of the way done, and restarted the computer. It booted from the Install DVD, and asked to install Mac OSX. This all after it said that it was installing before. Anyway, We selected the external drive and it said that an install could be recovered. Okay.... So, we said install.
After waiting another 45 minutes, about the length of an episode of MacGyver which we were watching at the time, the installer was done. It started up in Snow Leopard, and we were set to go.
Well, not much is different about snow Leopard. Except that the OS is written in 64-bit code. So, it uses much less memory, and CPU. In fact, in Activity Monitor, it says "Intel (64-bit)". That's cool.
I'll write more about Snow Leopard as I go along.
All for now!
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/
