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Mac Apps, Reviews, Previews, Interviews, and Giveaways.

Clips: A New Age of Clipboard Managers Has ComeOctober 29

Over the last few months, I have seen my fair share of new clipboard managers. Some of them are really just clipboard managers, but only one has really wowed me. This one has an amazing interface for handling clippings, but yet it is also extremely usable. It is Clips by Conceited Software.

The first thing that struck me about Clips is its beautiful interface. There are two main windows that you will be using, and both of them look great! The first one is called the Organizer. It has a CoverFlow view of all your clippings. It is exactly like the CoverFlow in the Finder; it has a list view on the bottom and the CoverFlow on the top. It has columns for date, application clipped from, and name. If you are running a slower computer (with Intel integrated GPU and a low amount of RAM), this is going to be the main window that you will be using. If you have a newer or faster computer, or if you’d rather not use the organizer, you’ll probably want to be using the Board.

The Board definitely f

iPhone Copy-Paste Must be Implemented by AppleOctober 23

Let’s say you just received a text message from a friend with the address of a restaurant you plan to meet at tonight. You’re in a hurry, so you’d like to quickly forward that info on to a friend. On a computer, you’d probably highlight that text, copy it, and paste it into an email. Yet, that simple ability to copy and paste a block of text is a concept that has eluded iPhone users since the device launched last summer.

Yes, it’s no mystery that iPhone users would benefit from copy-and-paste functionality. In fact, the feature frequently tops bloggers’ lists of most requested additions. So, now that we have this bustling App Store and hundreds of eager developers, why are we still forced to memorize and retype names and addresses?

John Casasanta, president of the iPhone app development company Tap Tap Tap, would love to build it, but with the tools Apple gives developers, it’s technically impossible. “Apple doesn’t really provide it in their SDK,” he said. “There’s no real way of doing copy-paste.”

That didn’t stop one developer from trying. One effort involved creating a framework for third-parties to build into their apps that would allow them to share text among a common repository. But because the ability would need the support of each individual developer, it wasn’t a feasible solution. “Ultimately, it wouldn’t really work for anyone because even if third-parties supported

PDFPen: Turning Your PDFs In To PaperOctober 20

Apple has always been very generous to us by giving us a great, free PDF viewer. Although, sometimes that is just not enough. Sometimes we need features like annotation, forms and shapes. Sure, there’s Adobe Acrobat but that’s extremely pricy if you just want a few more features than Preview. Well, there’s another choice: SmileOnMyMac’s PDFPen.

Think about a piece of paper with text on it. You can draw on it, annotate it and white out text. This is exactly what PDFPen lets you do to PDFs. It turns a PDF into a piece of paper. However, that’s not all it does. It has many other great features; one of which is OCR.

OCR (optimal character recognition) is a technology used to read text. When you scan a piece of paper onto your computer, even if you scan to a PDF, it is really just an image. OCR lets you turn that image into a PDF with real text. This makes it searchable and editable. To OCR a document in PDFPen, just go to Edit>OCR… You really won’t need to even go to that menu to do it, because when you open up a PDF that’s just an image, PDFPen will ask you if you want it to OCR the document, the page, or not OCR at all. If your PDF is a little skewed (you may have scanned it that way) then I suggest t

Bento 2.0 Released With Many Exciting FeaturesOctober 14

Last Week, I reviewed Bento 1.0, the extremely easy-to-use database tool designed for the Mac. Well, little did I know that only a week later Bento 2.0 would be released.

Bento 2.0 contains many nice new features, and a little layout adjustment. First, I will talk about the layout adjustment. In previous versions of Bento there was a panel on the right side of the window. This panel contained all of the fields for the current database. In 2.0, this has been moved over to the right side below the Library list. This gives you much more room for the database itself and makes Bento less cluttered. However, if you have a lot of libraries or fields, this can get fairly annoying.

Another layout change added in Bento 2.0 is the Table View. Before, it was really just a table with all of your records for a certain library. But 2.0 has added many more functionalities, making it even more like a spreadsheet. The biggest improvement here (and there are many) is the ability to change and add fields within the Table View itself. So, if you like a more classic database, you can do everything you need with just the Table View. It should also be pointed out that all tables (as in a fil

Notebook 3.0: A Truly Noteworthy UpdateOctober 10

If you are in school then you know how important it is to take notes, no matter what the class. The old way to do this on your Mac was to just create a lot of Pages or Office documents, and put them in a folder. That method starts to have major flaws once you reach maybe 15 different documents. Well, Circus Ponies brought virtual notebooks onto your computer once with NoteBook, and they’ve done it even better with NoteBook 3.0.

The first thing you will notice about NoteBook is how much it actually looks like a notebook. It has the fringes and everything! It makes it seem much more like taking notes than when done in Pages.

When you first open NoteBook you will be prompted with a dialogue that lets you create a new notebook from a starting point. You will notice that there are many options, so NoteBook is not really just for notes; it can be for anything that involves writing! The automatically selected option is Take Notes, which is what most people use it for. You can also choose to learn how to use NoteBook by just clicking Learn to Use NoteBook in a Few Easy Steps. If you