• Trailguru
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• iTrail

Everybody needs to sleep, and more than just a few hours each night. It's not just a matter of being in a foul mood all day; there are some pretty serious physiological effects of sleep deprivation. Since you tend to learn the most when you do things incorrectly, I know plenty about lost sleep. Anything that helps my insomnia is worth checking into, so I've spent some time looking at ways my Mac and my iPhone might help me lay down, and stay down. I took a look at the iPhone first; there are more than a few apps available which make me drowsy, but only two that I could find which do it intentionally: aSleep and Ambiance. Fluff your pillow and read on to see how they stack up against each other and a few desktop applications.

Screencasting -- the not-so-ancient art of recording the computer screen for the entertainment and enrichment of others -- has evolved into quite a Hydra of options. How do the myriad gladiators in this arena stack up? I've tried everything I could find that could record a little movement on the screen, and selected 8 contenders for the matchup. We'll start this boxing match off with the free apps, and then see if the "money" apps stack enough features on to make them worth the cash.

While I'm not a hard-core professional illustrator or cartoonist, I do use vector design tools almost every day. Designing logos, playing with type, and creating quick layouts are things every vector design tool should do well.

Adobe Illustrator CS3, of course, is the 800-pound gorilla in this field, and it's my tool of choice. But there are plenty of people who don't need the extensive functionality that Illustrator provides. Plus, Illustrator is something of a resource hog (right now, it's using 176MB of real memory and 1.21GB of virtual memory on my system).

Today, I'm going to review four leaner, lower-cost (or free) options from four high-powered indie Mac developers: DrawBerry, EazyDraw, Lineform, and VectorDesigner. Unlike Illustrator, all of these use Mac OS X's built-in Core Image foundation, which makes them very easy to compare to each other.

It's high noon for vector apps, after the jump.

Whether you want to post something to a web page or blog, or show off an application element in a presentation, taking quality screenshots is becoming an increasingly common task for lots of different Mac users. Although OS X comes with its own built-in screenshot utility, Grab, and onboard F-keys for the task, there are lots of third-party options as well. Contrary to popular belief, not all screen capture applications are created equal.

So what program is the best for taking quality screenshots off of your computer? To find out, I put five screen capture programs through their paces to try to find the "ultimate" screen-capture program.

The programs I used:

• Grab - built into OS X
• Skitch - free (at least while in beta)
• Snapz Pro X - $29 for image capture only, $69 for image and motion capture
• InstantShot! - free
• QuickSnap - $14.95

Read-on for my analysis and take a look at the gallery for screenshots from each program, as well as head-to-head comparisons.

Gallery: TUAW Faceoff: Screenshot apps on the firing line