Posts Tagged ‘mac-applications’

I’ve spent the evening playing with ArtRage 2, a great little painting application which I discovered via Bzangy Groink. It’s purely a painting program as opposed to a Photoshop wannabe, and does a brilliant job of creating paint effects.

Thick paint smears and blends, pencils and chalks smudge, and markers work just like they do in the real world. Many of the tools can be adjusted to give different effects. You can paint with thinned oils, use wet or dry markers, soften your pencil and control the hardness of the crayon, and much more.

The program enables you to import images to ‘trace’, and can automatically load your brush with the correct colour from the underlying picture. I especially like the option of washing out brushes in the jar of water.

The interface takes a bit of getting used to, but UI designers at Adobe could learn a thing or two from it (for example, palettes moving out the way when you paint near them, and the zoom tool, which I found really intuitive).

ArtRage is available for Mac and Windows and, best of all, there’s a free version as well as the full version (which is a steal at only $20!).

On an unrelated note (well, perhaps a tenuous ‘free things for computers’ theme), the Streetmap Firefox Extension is pretty handy - highlight a UK street name or postcode and right-click to launch a map of it from Streetmap, Multimap or Google Maps.

Jesus, the bad news yesterday seemed particularly relentless, didn’t it? First it was hundreds or thousands dead in the US, with thousands made homeless. Then it was 900 or so crushed or drowned in Iraq. And finally the train killing a woman and her two kids outside London. Terribly depressing, but at the same time it makes one remember how lucky one is I suppose.

In the hope of finding some good news, I just checked the BBC’s headlines in NetNewsWire (a super RSS feed reader for the Mac whose features I’m really appreciating having come from Sage and Firefox’s live bookmarks). I got as far as Apes ‘extinct in a generation’ and Shots fired at New Orleans rescue helicopter before giving up (and chucked on the soundtrack to the Big Lebowski - impossible to be depressed whilst listening to the Gypsy Kings’s version of Hotel California).

On the subject of Katrina, what’s the difference between ‘finding’ and ‘looting’? A: the colour of your skin apparently.

Right, I’m off to see if I can find a story about a cute puppy saving its owner from a fire or something…

With my purchase of an iBook looking imminent, I’ve started thinking about Mac equivalents for some of the software I use on a regular basis. There’s no problem as far as PHP is concerned, as Zend IDE is available for the Mac too, as are the usual suspects from Macromedia and Adobe. However for MySQL administration and development I use a nice, simple GUI front-end called SQLyog (free), but that’s not currently available for Mac.

After a bit of Googling, I got somewhat sidetracked by EMS MySQL Manager (free trial / $134) which, although only available on Windows, is a fantastic program, packed full of nice features and tools for MySQL development.

I did find Navicat (free trial / $95) which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Although not quite as feature-laden as EMS MySQL Manager, it’s not too far behind, and includes lots of similar tools (such as a visual query designer).

On the subject of applications, here are two free programs I recommend to anyone wanting to analyse their Apache logs offline rather than on the server.

Funnel Web Analyzer by Quest Software is available for Windows, Linux and Mac, and produces really comprehensive, attractive reports (and graphs) on just about every aspect of visitor activity. Also worth a look is Relax, a free log analysis tool for referrer information processing.