Here's the craziest name ever for a Mac app that does more than expected and at a very odd price. JamesJr is a digital photo utility with three main functions.Sorting: JamesJr sorts photos in multiple folders and can batch upload photos into iPhone and add keywords.Photo Editing: This isn't... Read More »

With very little effort you can find a dozen photo apps on the Mac App Store which perform one or two tricks, and nothing more. PicFrame is a good example. This 99-cent app lets you create photos with frames, collage style.Select the frame you want from the sidebar, then drop photos into PicFrame.Select... Read More »

Far be it for me to fully understand or criticize a Mac app developer's business model, but I do wonder why there are commercial apps that do what free apps already do. Take the app Appointments as an example.By itself, and without comparing it to other calendar-based apps, Appointments is attractive... Read More »

Times change. There once was a time when a company manufactured and sold a product in exchange for money. Today's digital world has altered that landscape with many new business models.For example, Google gives away products for free, but in exchange for information. That data becomes the product... Read More »

In real estate, it's location, location, location. For Mac users, it's backup, backup, backup. The reason for a backup is obvious. Mac storage devices, whether the standard hard disk drive (HDD), or newfangled solid state storage (SSD), can crash and burn and take all your data into digital oblivion.Add... Read More »

When it comes to the Mac, there are three kinds of applications. What the pro's use. The good apps that deliver more bang for the buck (under promise and over deliver). And pretty much everything else.Adobe Illustrator is a good example of what the professionals use in design and graphic shops. It's... Read More »

One of the more obvious and sometimes overused trends in photography these days is black and white and color. Color is stripped from a photograph, then color is brought back, but only on a single object within the photo.Here's an example from the app Tintii. The color is stripped out, then replaced... Read More »

How has your life been recorded? Photos? Movie clips? More photos? A life worth living is also worth writing about. Most of our lives are a mix of humdrum events and stacked with tasks, but there are plenty of observations and events worth more than a click on your camera.Mac users have many options... Read More »

This digital age we live in has a few drawbacks. One of them is the growing number of photos and videos stuffed into iPhoto. Sure, we can segregate the library into albums and events, but it's still one giant library of photos that gets larger and larger.We could also take our better photos from... Read More »

What makes a Mac a popular computer worthy of our hard earned dollars? There's the industrial design of the hardware, and the set it-and-forget it aspect of OS X, and Apple's built-in apps (iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, Garageband). As much as anything, there's peace of mind, which is born from a reputation... Read More »

As much as we might like it to be, the 21st century definitely is not the century for file format standards. We're getting there, but conversion utilities are still a fact of life (images, audio, video and more).What does it take to convert an image or photo from one file format to another? Arguably,... Read More »

What would aliens from another world think of Mac and iPhone users and the dozens or hundreds of to-do and reminder apps we use? Would the little green men from Mars think humans weak and unsophisticated because we need to be reminded of every little thing?The promise of Siri as the intelligent assistant... Read More »

There was a time when I was young that I longed to become an artist. A graphic artist. A designer. Even a developer of animated cartoons. It's probably a good thing I abandoned that career as I would have been the epitome of a starving artist. Literally starving.Back in the day, artists, designers,... Read More »

Do you encrypt files on your Mac? It doesn't happen often, but I had a project which required file encryption, so I ventured into the Mac App Store to see what was up. It turns out that encryption is a big deal (at least, based upon the number of Mac apps that encrypt files).On the free end of the... Read More »