If you're on your way back to school this year, or you know someone who is, a new MacToSchool software bundle could save you some cash. Featuring twelve apps ranging in appeal and actual usefulness, this bundle offers $300 worth of software for $49.95. Included in the MacToSchool package are apps like Clockwork, a simple desktop timer, WriteRoom, the popular full-screen text editor that helps you focus on your writing, a family history app, a calendar-based financial planner and more. Pencils Down - a test building app for teachers - is even included, making this package appealing to the other side of the education fence that, as the husband of a high school English teacher can attest to, often doesn't get the attention and discounts it deserves.

The typical price you would have to pay for even a few of these apps could easily add up to $50, so this could certainly be a valuable package. Each app at the MacToSchool.org site has a simple description page and a demo download so you can try everything before you buy, and there are also links to the orignal app developers' sites in case you need more info. Interestingly, this bundle was organized by the developers themselves in an effort to help spread the word about the utility of 3rd party software and to do something good for the education community.

The press release we received says 'limited time only' but makes no mention of when the deal will end, so my advice would be to act sooner rather than later if you're interested.

It's that time of the week again folks - the TUAW Talkcast is once again upon us! Our regular host Michael Rose is taking the week off, so I'll be taking the hosting reigns for the night. Join TUAW bloggers Dave Caolo, Erica "iPhone Pwner" Sadun, Mike Schramm and myself for a discussion on the week's big news, hopefully some live Ask TUAW where we field your questions and yet another trivia contest for a TUAW shirt! After the show is done, we'll open up the lines so everyone can chat before calling it a night.

To participate or listen in on our TalkShoe-powered Talkcasts, register (free) at TalkShoe.com. This will give you a pin you can use to call in with a regular or VoIP phone. If you want to text chat with us and other participants, you'll need to download and sign in with their java client as well. If you can't be with us tonight though, don't worry - as usual, we'll provide the recording for download and via our TUAW Podcast feed (RSS and iTunes) within a day or so.

It should be another good show tonight, so we hope to see you all there!

Mailplane, the email client that integrates Gmail with Mac OS X, has released v1.5 with an updated iPhoto plug-in that brings compatibility for the new iLife '08 version. This now makes Mailplane's iPhoto plug-in compatible with versions 5, 6 and the new 7, which I prefer calling iPhoto '08 to avoid version confusion. You can simply use the Check for Updates command from Mailplane's application menu, and the developer recommends everyone update even if they don't have the latest iLife; turns out the current beta version expires on August 30th. A separate new version with bug fixes and new features is 'coming soon.'

Web 2.0 is great and all, but I bought a Mac to utilize the power of Mac OS X and its software. While working in a browser certainly has its advantages, I believe that the sweet spot of getting work done shouldn't force the user into choosing between two appealing environments. The sweet spot of which I am speaking, of course, is integration and sync - the much sought-after, hard-to-find features that some companies offer with their products, while others at least leave the door open for enterprising 3rd parties to pick up the slack. Fortunately, one of the 'others' I speak of is 37signals with Highrise, their popular web-baesd contact and correspondence app, and the enterprising 3rd party in this case is Simon Menke, developer of Greatascent. This is one of the hands-down coolest plug-ins I've seen in a while that unites web 2.0 with what I like to call desktop 2.0 - the place where desktop apps can interact and sync with online services.

Greatascent, currently in a private beta, is a plug-in for Address Book (and soon other parts of Mac OS X) that serves as a middle man between the contacts on your Mac and those in Highrise. In its early beta state, Greatascent can pull down the contacts you're already working with in Highrise, but its real appeal is allowing you to drag and drop contacts from Address Book onto a new group that is added (pictured) to instantly sync them up to Highrise. Once synchronized, however, another gem of working in Highrise is brought to the desktop: from Address Book's File menu, you can select a Highrise contact and create a new Highrise note or task that is then synched up to the service. Read on after the jump for some screenshots and details of just how cool this plug-in can get.

Read more →

Before you say anything, I know - YouTube is the last thing you need to have lying around at the flick of a mouse or stroke of a key. I just couldn't stop myself from blogging this because it shot to the top of Apple's popular Dashboard widgets chart, and it really is well done. The YouTube Dashboard widget allows for searching YouTube, displaying Just Added, Most Discussed, Featured and Most Viewed videos, and you can even condense it for those times when you want to at least appear like you might be getting work done. Clicking a video opens a larger window in the Dashboard to watch it, and therein lies one catch. For some odd reason you aren't presented with YouTube's video controller; just a pause/play button. Another bummer is that you can't log into your own account to rate or mark videos as favorites, but if you're just looking for a quick window into YouTube that's easy to show and hide, this YouTube widget just might be your answer.

Attention all ye Facebook and iPhoto users: you may feel free to begin using iPhoto '08, now that Facebook has updated their Facebook Exporter plug-in. We first found this plug-in back in March, and while I'm definitely not the most active Facebook user or photo uploader, I don't think anything else is new. However, I just noticed a really cool feature that allows you to click anywhere on an image in the well on the right to create an outlining box around it, allowing you to name or tag whatever you're highlighting.

Facebook Exporter for iPhoto is provided for free by Facebook.

With the speed of evolution in computing, standards and the web, have you ever wondered why we've been stuck with JPG as an image format for so long? Microsoft sure did, and after about 5 years of mulling the question, the company has produced what sounds like a very promising replacement: HD Photo. Offering greater support for new digital imaging trends like HDR (High Dynamic Range), HD Photo boasts the same or better image quality than JPG in half the file size. While Microsoft has patents on some of the technology in HD Photo, they are surprisingly allowing anyone to license it for free for use in apps and devices like photo editing software and digital cameras. To learn more than you might ever want to know about HD Photo, check out its Wikipedia entry or episode #51 of TWiM (This Week in Media), one of my favorite podcasts in which the crew sits down with Bill Crow, Microsoft's Program Manager for HD Photo. Be careful with that one though - TWiM's cast is composed of some incredibly knowledgeable, hard-core media geeks, and they eventually get their geek on with Crow as they delve into the discussion.

Long story short: excitement is steadily building for HD Photo, as it is shaping up to be quite the revolutionary image format that could (hopefully) knock JPG off its pedestal some day. Fortunately, the HD Photo team have taken another step in spreading the format by releasing a Photoshop CS2/CS3 plug-in for PowerPC and Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. The plug-in can be downloaded from Microsoft, and it for some odd reason expires on December 31, 2007. If you know your stuff when it comes to image formats and you give this plug-in a spin, let us know what you think in the comments.

[via Macworld]

Mint is an excellent web stats tracking app from Shaun Inman with a powerful, extensible plug-in architecture. The iPhone is an excellent... well you know the rest of that one. While these two things might not have much to do with each other at first glance, a plug-in and a hack have brought us one step closer to having a more minty iPhone experience.

First up is a new iPhone Pepper (aka - plug-in) for Mint that formats your stat panes into a single column for better viewing on MobileSafari. Simply install it via the typical Mint procedure, activate it and *boom* - this new pepper stays out of your way when using a real desktop browser, but auto-detects MobileSafari and displays the proper single-column formatting when you're on the go. The drop-down pane atop Mint's admin panel even works, offering quick access to panes way down below with only two taps.


Next up on the list of iPhone Mint-ification steps you can take is adding a full-blown Home screen button for Mint, courtesy of iPhone Apper and what looks like the easiest way to get ssh/sftp installed on the iPhone yet.

Read more →

Whether you have a good reason for wanting to maintain more than one iPhoto library or your collection simply became un-browsable long ago, Brian Webster's iPhoto Library Manager is your answer. This slick little utility was mentioned briefly in an Ask TUAW back in May, but to summarize: iPhoto Library Manager makes it painfully simple to create multiple iPhoto libraries, keep them anywhere you want, automate them with AppleScript and Automator, switch between them with a single click and even set one library as the default. But it doesn't stop there - the features I've already listed are available in a free version, but registered users get to enjoy the ability to create library shortcuts for opening straight from the Finder, copying photos (and preserving all their metadata) between libraries, merging libraries and copying photos from multiple libraries into a folder for synching with an iPod. To top all this off, the new v3.3 brings iPhoto '08 compatibility and some other goodies.

What does it cost for this multiple iPhoto library goodness? To gain the more powerful features and give Webster his due, iPhoto Library Manager costs a mere $19.95 from Fat Cat Software.

Yesterday my co-blogger Dave Caolo was lamenting the fact that there's no easy way to get his iPhone and Google Calendar to sync (although purchasing Spanning Sync is certainly an option). While it is true that the iPhone's Calendar app only syncs with iCal on a Mac (or, via this trick, Entourage as well), I replied to Dave's woes with: who needs sync, anyway?

I am a happy iCal/iPhone/Google Calendar syncher, thanks to Spanning Sync, but I realize that one man's cup of tea is another man's grubby water. For those that would prefer to simply stick with Google Calendar for all their calendaring, the service actually scales incredibly well for an iPhone. This isn't an iPhone-specific UI or portal like so many other companies are launching. Rather, it seems to be their streamlined UI designed for most mobile phones. Either way, the list of upcoming events looks great, and all you need to do is visit the standard calendar.google.com on your iPhone to get redirected.

Read more →