Two Great Free Software Goodies

I came across two apps that I'm betting many people will find useful on their Macs: Milkyway and RapidoStart.

Milkyway (MW) is a small program by Launay Software that previews your image files with a pop-up window that you can resize. I tried this out because of a complaint from my wife. My wife was told me the other day that she couldn't easily preview images by selecting them with a large enough window in the finder. She also didn't really want to use iPhoto (because it's sluggish as hell, in part).

So, recently, MW popped up on MacUpdate with a new version. I kind of remember downloading this in the past, but it didn't work right - but my memory is fuzzy. When it's installed and you start the app, it stays out of sight. You can choose to show the icon in the menubar (way cool) and you can choose to have it start on log-in.

The MW pop up previews can be resized considerably, and you can also move the window wherever you like on your screen for future pop-ups. It also has this 3D glass effect - nice touch - that you can choose to disable if it's annoying. Give MW a try! I like it, and it's just unobtrusive enough to like.

The other free app I think many of you will like is RapidoStart, by App4Mac - makers of some other free apps with the "Rapido" prefix, like "RapidoWrite". [Note - I sort of recall that this RapidoWrite was shareware at one point - got a note from the developer once. Maybe it didn't sell well.] App4Mac also makes other apps in the shareware or commercial category as well.

RapidoStart (RS) was updated recently and caught my eye in a discussion about uses with QuickSilver. RS is essentially a supplemental dock you can call up when you need it by clicking on a small green tab in the corner - or with a key-command. The pop-up dock is customizable; you can add what ever apps or files you want and even make several sets of things for different purposes (e.g., image manipulation apps, PDF apps, research project docs). For those that don't like the non-visual nature of QuickSilver, it provides a visual way to get at apps you don't have room for on the doc. And if you are someone like me, with many apps I use for different purposes (and you can't remember the names) - RS seems like a great way to get to these apps. Unlike Quicksilver, which learns your patterns and sets up the keyboard shortcuts, you'll have to customize RS your self for the files you want to access.

The pop-up window is gorgeous - well rendered, and the app is very solid. Give it a shot and see if it helps your work flow.

Jing-a-Ling

Jing is a free (for now) application on both Windoze and Mac that allows you to capture images or even video from you screen. This is being touted as a way you can do tech support for your friends, relatives, etc. without having to be in the same place. Jing saves its content as .swf files (flash animations) and there is a way to share your Jing content on their server - Screencasts.com. 

The Screencast service is free for now for use with Jing, and run by the same people (TechSmith). Apparently, TechSmith is assessing usage patterns to decide where they want to go with Jing and Screencasts. But for now, you can use both for free. And you can always save things to your desktop for later use.

I gave the Mac client for Jing a spin and it seems to work OK. There doesn't seem to be any detailed documentation for the app, just a demo movie on the Jing site and FAQs. The app starts out in 'sun mode' on the Mac - which means you can find the program icon after you start the app. The sun mode icon lives in the upper right hand side of your screen, under the Spotlight icon. Mousing there makes the sun icon pop up along with three options (capture, history, more) which have their own little pop-up balloons. The "more" option gives you several settings to choose from, including preferences to use a menubar item instead. I highly recommend this. If you choose capture, you get some sort of crosshairs to select the part of the screen you want to capture. I found this a bit difficult to use, as it often would only select the program window, but not its menus. Furthermore any active app you work in will sort of move from the active window, requiring you to select it manually as your first move.

After selection you choose from Image, Movie, Redo, or cancel. Movie records screen actions within the area selected. Image takes a screen shot. After you've recorded your shot/movie, you can save it or 'share it' which uploads it to your Screencasts account. After sharing and uploading, the url for the content is saved to the clipboard. So, you can paste it into your chat window or email. However, it would be nice if you had a list of shared content URLs to easily access. The History option of the main menu shows the vids/shots you've recorded thus far - but apparenly not the URLs.

I found the app easy to use, but a bit quirky. You can view a screencast file I did here for saving to PDF files on a Mac.

There are other options out there for recording screen actions on Macs. The most popular seem to be iShowU and Snapz Pro X. Both of these are $20 and $29, respectively. As Jing is free, it's gotten many more downloads on MacUpdate. If your are interested in making screen movies, give Jing a try. The developers seem very open to input on improving the app.

iClip - Mini Review

MacZot is having a ReviewZot, where every review of the featured app will decrease the price of the app until it is FREE as in beer. Yes, this means free advertizing for the developers, but it is a fun way to get a free copy of an app. 

I got iClip orginally through MacZot and another copy through the MacHeist bundle. iClip (by Inventive) sits in your menu bar and stores multiple copies of your clipboard. It's keeps a memory of those things you copy or paste, and lets you call up those clippings later on when you need it. The clippings can be for graphics or text, and you can save customized clipping sets that you will use frequently. For example, when grading pdf papers from students, I paste the grade breakdown as a template via the comments function in Preview. iClip lets me keep a set of paper grade templates I can call on easily.

You can call up iClip by either mousing to the menubar icon an clicking, or mousing to the hot area of the screen you assign. The iClip app has a 'pop-up' window with the clippings. The app looks very slick and cool, with these lens-looking clip portals. You can customize these portals' size and shape (round or square). The previous version of iClip used rectangular panels instead, and while visually inferior to the current version, it seemed to be a better use of space, particularly on small screens. The developer should consider an option to return to the simple pop up window interface for those who might prefer lower resource usage.

Although I don't activate the app all the time, when I do use it - it has been very fast and stable in nearly all cases. The only time I had any problems was trying it on an Intel Mini with Parallels Desktop, trying to copy and paste from the Windows virtual machine. My recollection is that iClip quit or crashed - but my memory is a bit hazy. Never-the-less, that particular situation is not very common for me, so it's not a big deal.

The only other complaint I have is that the full price ($29) is a bit steep for iClip, so the only way I've obtained it was at a discount. This is a very slick app, but pricing it at $10 or $15 might be a better marketing ploy. 

I've not compared this app with any other similar utilities, so I can't really contrast iClip with them. However, if you can get a copy of iClip - I recommend it highly.