My appointments with the clients would be stored on Google Calendar and imported into Thunderbird or Outlook through some scary third party plugins or websites. Project data was probably on the file system – if I was lucky.

My wife was used to using ACT! by Sage. We bought a couple of licenses for ACT! a while back, before we made the switch to Mac OSX and it certainly helped keep us better organised. And then we switched to Mac OSX and could no longer use ACT! (actually we could of course using VirtualBox, Parallels or VMWare Fusion – but that meant using Windows still, which we didn’t really want to do). And then we discovered Daylite and haven’t looked back.

Why have we never looked back? Because the way Daylite works fits in so well with our business. MarketCircle seem to have built Daylite on a simple concept, that all aspects of ones business are linked, and therefore you can link all aspects together within Daylite. The whole operating principal of Daylite is structured around linking items to each other.

So, what sorts of data can Daylite store for us?

• Organization Details (companies etc)
• Contact Details
• Projects
• Tasks
• Notes
• Opportunities
• Appointments

All of these data types can be linked to each other, so you can create a new Project, which is linked to an Organization (or multiple Organizations) which are then linked to Contacts. Projects and Opportunities allow you to track the progress of each using user defined ‘pipelines’ so you can better plan and review where each of your projects and opportunities are at.

Daylite comes with Daylite Mail Integration (DMI) which is a fantastic utility (although not without its faults) which plugs into Mail.app and integrates Mail.app with Daylite. Highlighting a message in Mail.app will cause DMI to search the Daylite database to see if the e-mail has been stored there against the customer record. If Daylite cannot find a matching e-mail address, Daylite will allow you to create a Contact quickly and easily, and then with the tick of a simple checkbox your e-mail is imported into Daylite and linked to that Contact.

The display of emails within Daylite is pretty good, HTML e-mails are displayed as they should. I do sometimes notice a lag between adding the email from Mail.app to it showing up in Daylite but it’s usually only a few minutes and nothing particularly to worry about. They always end up there.

DMI can be quite flaky on occasions and is heavily coupled to the version of Mail.app you’re using, so don’t be surprised if a Software Update from Apple breaks your Daylite Mail Integration. MarketCircle are pretty quick to keep up with new versions though and I’ve never been without it for more than a few days.

I do find it best to unset the option to automatically connect to Daylite when Mail is started though. This was on advice from MarketCircle after I had some network issues whereby Daylite would lose touch with the server, which would cause Daylite to crash. This crash would then ask me if I wanted to send a crash report to MarketCircle, to which I responded yes, but because Daylite was down, Mail wouldn’t work either and I couldn’t do anything with either of them until I used Force Quit from the dock. Taking the tick out of the box seems to help. Although it still crashes on occasions if the network blips, I don’t get stuck in a loop of each app relying on the other to work. The screenshot on the right is taken from Mail.app Preferences.

One quite annoying let down with Daylite however is the handling of other files that you may want to attach to the client record. With Sage ACT! the file was imported and stored into the actual ACT! database, whereas with Daylite only a link to the file is stored. There’s two aspects to this, one is good and one is bad. The good part about Daylite’s approach is that your database doesn’t end up being huge. That’s good for backup purposes. But on the other hand, that’s also the bad side. I’d like all my customer files, whatever their format, to be stored in the Daylite database so I know where they are and that they’re being seperately backed up. At the moment I have to maintain a seperate file hierarchy on the filesystem itself and make sure it’s backed up and that I don’t delete it. I’d prefer a bigger Daylite database to have that peace of mind. Having said that, PDF documents are imported into the system and can be viewed directly within Daylite, which is a plus.

Daylite also comes with an Appointments database, or calendar which integrates and synchronises nicely with iCal – and with your iPhone if you have one. You can also purchase Daylite Touch seperately if the standard iCal integration isn’t enough for you. Daylite Touch is a nice little iPhone app which I’ll review here later, although this site isn’t really about iPhone application reviews, this one is sufficiently linked to OSX through needing Daylite that I’ll make an exception! The appointments database can do everything you’d expect from such a feature – recurring appointments, appointments linked to Projects, Contacts, Organizations, Opportunities etc.

There’s only a couple of minor gripes – the DMI tight coupling being one. Another slight niggle is that pressing the X in the corner makes most applications of this nature disappear (or hide) but with Daylite the X means quit. On OSX Leopard that means you have to minimise the application which gives you an extra dock icon while Daylite is running. Snow Leopard users won’t notice this as much since on Snow Leopard apps will minimise to their original dock icon rather than creating lots of new ones.

I’ve not even looked into the various reports that can be generated from Daylite – I suspect I’ve used about 25% of the actual functionality of Daylite. It’s extremely comprehensive, but fortunately doesn’t seem to exhibit this as bloat.

All in all, I believe Daylite is worth every cent of the $279 per seat. It’s around the same price as Sage ACT! and if they made a Windows version I really believe it would blow ACT! out of the water. If you’re an ACT! user who’s recently switched to Mac then MarketCircle can provide you with assistance to migrate your ACT data.

Daylite helps keep your business and client data in the one spot, and more importantly it helps keep you organised with that data. The linking between data items is intuitive and easy to use. The system is fast and doesn’t overburden you with data entry, allowing you to concentrate on running your business not your contact management software.

We give this application 9/10.

Review updated 16/05/12

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To say I right at this moment I am in debt to this program is an understatement. It’s also prompted me to review this while I am currently waiting for it to convert something.

I decided it was time to have some fun with iMovie and give it a go to create my own home movie with an assortment of clips from home videos from over the years.

I had one wedding video in .mpg which wouldn’t open with iMovie so I used MacX Video Convertor Pro to convert it straight into iMovie format (yes its an actual tab which makes it even easier to figure out).

The second video I needed to convert was of all things, a .wmv file which wouldn’t even play on the Mac let alone open in iMovie. In a few clicks that too was converted by this program with simplistic ease.

You can also copy down videos from YouTube, Myspace Videos etc with ease.

Second time this program as been of awesome value, my nieces wanted to make a video in iMovie with some videos they had taken on their JVC Everio, problem was the JCV kindly produces a .CED file that only the JVC can read. But after some Google research we figured out we probably could something with the .MTS files. Thankfully Video convertor had no issues doing this!

It has built in over 400 video and audio codecs as well as an advanced HD video decoding engine, it converts HD and regular video including MKV, M2TS, AVCHD, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and SD video AVI, MPEG, MP4, H.264, MOV, FLV, F4V, RM, RMVB, WebM, Google TV, etc, to Mac computer, iMovie, iTunes, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad/iPad 2/iPad 3, iPod touch 4, iPod classic, iPod nano, Apple TV, PSP, etc.

It’s super easy to use for any level and if you happen to know what you are doing there are loads of tweaks you can specify yourself.

I’ve been using this program for a few years now and have been happy with the lifetime updates and support received over that time.

- Rose

Related posts:

1. MacX DVD Ripper Pro

Direct Mail is an easy to use bulk email program for Mac. With a simple to use interface it provides all the power, bells and whistles you need without compromise.

Features worth highlighting include the ability to connect to most existing customer relation programs and pretty much any other app of any worth which contains your contact database. Current Mac applications include Apple Address Book, Daylite, Outlook, FileMaker Pro and more, you can also import from CSV files and MySQL databases.

I started using Direct Mail because of its integration with Daylite, just a few clicks and my selected contacts were imported into Direct Mail and ready to go.

You can easily use their editor to compose your emails and use tags to insert data from your contact list into the email to create personalised content, you can also create your own tags.

If you are handy with HTML you can produce your own code in your program of choice and simply cut and paste the code into Direct Mail, turn on HTML and its ready to go in that format.

Direct Mail comes with its own array of ready to edit designs with features like drag and drop images, the ability to check your spam score before you you’re your email out. You can also use templates from other sources like Campaign Monitor and Mail Chimp.

The tracking of emails is also of huge benefit so you can track campaigns to see who opened your email, how many times and which links they clicked.

Charts include: read, unread and bounced, clicked link distribution, views per day, unique views per day and link clicks per day and a map allows you to see your statistics visually according to location.

The user statistics section details the contact individually and records their views, unique link clicks, most recent clicks and more. If you have many contacts there is also a handy search feature if there is a particular person you want to look at.

Links contained within the email are itemised and the amount of clicks tallied along with unique clicks and most recent click information is displayed. You can also export this information.

Stamps is the iPhone app which allows you to keep an eye on your campaign data while on the go. This stunning little app free too.

Other options include the ability to add a form to your website which will automatically sync with Direct Mail for free, the code is provided and you can customise it to match your website look and feel.

Direct Mail also can manage your unsubscribe requests. Once a recipient has unsubscribed, they’ll simply appear in your list as crossed out, bounces are taken care of as well.

The website is easy to navigate and the FAQ section pretty much answers every question you could possibly think of. I haven’t tried their support as I haven’t had a reason to, but they are on Twitter and you can expect an answer fairly soon after posting. It’s also a good way to keep on top of the latest developments or outages.

If you don’t have your own mail server you can use their e3 delivery service for a fairly nominal monthly fee compared to other providers.

There are various payment plans if you need to use Direct Mails e3 mailing service. If you already manage your own email server it costs a one off payment of only $99USD and the emails will send via your own server.

If you are looking for an easy to use email marketing application, seriously do yourself a favour and buy this. I’m so impressed with it and find it the economic option available given its list of features.

- Rose

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Enter Keeper. It’s available in the Mac App Store, and is free. Kind of. You can use the free version, but if you want some of the extra features (such as multiple device synchronisation) then there is a subscription fee. This fee is pretty reasonable (at $9.99 per device per year) and although I’m presently only using the trial version, I will be upgrading when that trial expires.

What does it do?

Keeper provides a secure repository for all your passwords/passphrases/pincodes. It’s primarily designed around website login details, and offers a space for the login URL which is an active hyperlink that when clicked will open your default browser to the page you’ve specified. It doesn’t appear to automatically login for you (which is largely to be expected since each site has their own idea of how login is done). All your passwords are stored in this one application which is protected by a ‘master password’. Whilst the OSX Keychain does the same kind of thing, keychain ONLY works for logins, doesn’t provide the ability to go straight to the site from the app, and doesn’t allow you to store passwords or codes from things that you haven’t previously visited. Meaning you can’t store your mobile phone PIN code in it. But with Keeper you can.

Keeper’s subscription version (of which you’ll get a free 30 day trial when you download the app and sign up) allows the synchronisation of data seamlessly across your various devices. This can be extremely handy if you’re out and about and someone gives you a password in a meeting for example and you only have your iPhone with you. It doesn’t matter, simply enter the details into Keeper on your iPhone and when you get back home they’ll be sync’d to your Mac as well.

The app automatically locks itself after a few minutes of inactivity so that if you inadvertently leave it open in the background there’s minimal danger of you walking away and someone approaching your unlocked computer to grab all your passwords. The data that’s stored on the filesystem is encrypted so that a hacker can’t just look at the data file and get your passwords from outside of the app.

Working on OSX, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, iPad, Windows Phone means that just about whichever device and/or operating system you’re working on at the time, there’s a version of Keeper that’ll be syncing your passwords between themselves keeping your passwords easily accessible to you, but not accessible to people who shouldn’t have access to them.

Another feature which I’ve not yet used, but actually looks like quite a useful utility is the username and password generator. Shown as small dice on the right of the relevant box, clicking this will generate a random username or password for you. This would probably be even better if there was a way to automatically supply this information to the website after you’ve clicked on the link, since the usernames and passwords it comes up with, whilst highly secure and unguessable, are also quite hard to type correctly. I suppose though you can always copy and paste – I’m just lazy.

It’s fair to say that the Keeper documentation says that automatic ‘copy and pasting’ of your username and password should occur when you click the link to open a website login page. It doesn’t work for me on OSX Lion (and I’m pretty sure it didn’t on Snow Leopard either).

Finally, if your device is lost or stolen, Keeper will automatically destroy all the data within itself in the event of 5 unsuccessful login attempts. This helps to ensure that if your device should fall into the wrong hands, the new recipient doesn’t get much of a chance to get all your passwords.

Overall, despite the auto launch not adding the usernames and passwords into the relevant boxes when you open a new page, I find this app to be extremely user friendly, and an almost essential part of my every day browsing requirements these days.

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UPDATED REVIEW

I’ve been using this program a while now and have been through a few upgrades and wanted to update this review to reflect the changes.

I like this software as it’s easy to use and its interface suits users with basic computer competency though it also allows for more specific options for advanced users.

The updated version now selects the right video title, which makes it easier for basic users to rip the right title.

All the main formats you could possibly need are provided as options: DVD to MP4, H.264, MOV, FLV, MPEG, M4V, AVI, QT(QuickTime) all with high quality video and audio. The DVD Backup feature allows you to copy a DVD to a single video file with original video quality and 5.1-channels AC3/DTS Dolby audio.

The updated version at the time of writing is 3.4.1 that rips any encrypted DVD to iPhone (including 4S, iPad & iPad2, iPod and iMovie. MacX rips all types of encrypted DVD and copy-protected DVD (removes DVD CSS, region code, RCE, Sony ArccOS, UOPs, Disney, etc).

It now also rips to a slew of popular formats: Rip DVD to MP4, QT, FLV, H.264, MOV, AVI, MP3, MPEG, M4V formats which are compatible with Mac OS popular applications like QuickTime and iTunes, iPhone/iPhone 4S, iPad, iPod, iPod Touch, Apple TV, Android, HTC, Samsung, XOOM, Galaxy Tab, PSP, etc. So you can watch the DVD movie on QuickTime player and portable player devices.

MacX DVD Ripper Pro runs on Mac OS X Tiger/Leopard/Snow Leopard/Lion.

When I first reviewed this software it took me 33 minutes to rip a one hour fifty-five minute DVD to AVI. The quality was excellent. On the standard default settings the file size was 1.4 GB

With the latest 3.4.1 edition it took just 24 minutes to rip a two hour and five minute DVD to AVI the file size was 1.8 GB on the standard default setting.

Features worth highlighting include:

• Extract background music from the video file by importing the DVD file, and select “to Music” button. You will be able to extract the background music as MP3 music file.
• Select your own Preview Snapshot.
• Set the start and finish time to trim the video if desired.
• Advanced users can have better control over how the software outputs video and audio
• The help PDF which answers all the obvious questions as well as allowing you to learn more about the advanced options by explaining what some of the ‘jargon’ terminology means.
• There are also well labelled screenshots that I always think adds to the user manuals helpfulness.
• Digiarty Software, the company behind MacX DVD Ripper offers a 50% discount off all their products for approved charitable organisations, provided they have sufficient proof. This kind of generosity always impresses me about a company’s decency.
• The program comes with free lifetime upgrade service for registered users.

The verdict

While there are many DVD ripping programs available, this program offers all the usual features. The interface is easy to navigate for novice or advanced users. $49.95USD is a fair price for this software considering it includes free lifetime upgrades, a rare incentive in most software packages.

MacX DVD Ripper Pro is also often on sale and sometimes free for the full version especially around the holiday periods including events like Halloween and Thanks Giving. You can’t have lifetime updates for the free versions but its still fair to have a full working version for zero cost.

I also like that it is updated to reflect the changes in portable device medias and added features and improved reliability and speed.

The final thing I like about MacX DVD Ripper Pro is since purchasing a few years ago I have always had excellent technical support from their company even across the holidays.

Additional Info:

There is also now a free version of this software with limited features but you can still back up or rip your DVD including protected copies to MOV, MP4, MPEG, FLV and iTunes. Visit MacX DVD Ripper Mac Free Edition

Related posts:

1. MacX Video Convertor Pro

The preferences pane, shown to the right, is quite simple and provides the ability to decide which areas MacCleaning Pro will clean old unused files from. The utility can also be configured (as shown with the slider bar at the top of the preferences pane) to alert you when there is less than a certain percentage of disk space remaining. This could perhaps be quite handy, or quite annoying depending on how close to the edge you have to run your disk!

I’m not at all convinced that the emptying of system and user caches is a good thing for performance, but I’m no expert in that field so it may not be a problem. Perhaps people could give me a better idea of that aspect in comments below?

An aspect of cleaning up that would be very useful would be to allow files / log entries newer than a certain date to remain. Or conversely to only delete files that are older than a certain date. When it comes to system logs, it’s fair to say there’s probably an inordinate amount of cruft in my system log and removing most of it occasionally is a useful thing. However, this utility just removes the entire log file, whereas I would like to have been able to keep the last 3 days worth of entries.

The menubar that comes with MacCleaning Pro is a nice touch, although the look and feel doesn’t really match the rest of OSX with the green bar. Having said that, the bar changes colour when you reach the disk threshold so I suspect they chose green to mean ‘OK’. It still looks a bit out of place somehow even with that in mind. Some artistic touch would definitely not go astray there to bring it more into line with other OSX icons and labels in the menu bar. The red highlighting that your disk is running low is good though.

You can see from the image that once again, simplicity is the order of the day. Clicking on the drive icon or the green bar brings up a menu which enables you to Eject All your mounted drives, open the Preferences or run a Fast Clean. We discussed the preferences above, and I’m not sure I see the point of an Eject All but then I don’t use many external disks or mount many DMGs, preferring to clear these up as I go if I do use them at all.

The Fast Clean option is the reason for this programs existence and to be honest, it does what it says on the tin. But if you’re expecting any whizzy bits to go along with this, you won’t find them. It cleans, it gives you a progress bar while it does it and that’s about it. I couldn’t even find anywhere that told me after the fact what actually been deleted. I was also quite concerned that I didn’t get any option to decide which (if any files) should be deleted and which shouldn’t. Though I understand that these options are set through the Preferences pane, I wasn’t brave enough to select the ‘Users Download Folder’ in there because I really didn’t want to lose ALL my downloads – even though there’s probably some junk in there that can now go.

Overall, sadly, the application just seems to be a little unfinished. It’s missing the polish I’m used to with Mac apps. I think that EaseUS have gone for a simplistic approach but perhaps taken that design ethos a little too far. There’s no duplicate file detection for example, which a lot of the other cleaners have (though most don’t make easy to use!). The lack of confirmation of which files to actually delete scares me (and says ‘unfinished’ too) and it would be a useful addition if the application would scan your Applications folder and present you with the ability to delete applications that you no longer use. Of course, that’s pretty straight forward on OSX anyway, so that may be why they haven’t bothered. It would be nice if this app were a ‘work in progress’ and more features were coming shortly – perhaps based on feedback from reviews even. If that’s the case, I’ll update the review to reflect that.

But, it is very simple to use, and it works quickly. It freed up 1.2G of space on my MacBook Pro, which I tend to keep fairly tidy anyway. It does what it says on the tin, nothing more and nothing less.

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This is even more frustrating if you’re on a Mac, because, unless you use the latest Microsoft Office which comes with a Mac version of Outlook, you won’t be able to open these files natively.

Fortunately, there’s TNEF’s Enough which will rescue you. It’s a little free application that you can use to open winmail.dat attachments and get to their contents. I’ve tested it personally and it enabled me to get to an Excel Spreadsheet that had been sent to me by an organisation that refuses to get into the 21st Century with their IT.

Whilst TNEF’s enough does work, and it works well, I find it a little less than intuitive to use. It’s quite possible that the way I would like it to run is not possible given the way Apple can be with their applications, but if it’s possible it’d be nice to have the application operate as a Mac Mail plugin that simply deconstructs the winmail.dat file in situ and doesn’t require me to drag and drop or save the attachment first. It’s a minor thing, and to be honest, I’m just glad I can get at the contents of a winmail.dat at all.

Ideally winmail.dat would die and no-one would need TNEF’s Enough, but until that day comes, if you need to open winmail.dat files, this is an easy to use solution (albeit with a couple of extra clicks that’d be nice not to have) and you can’t argue with the price – it’s free!

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ReviewMacSoftware would like to extend it’s condolences to the Jobs family – the extended family that is the Jobs’ and Apple. I can’t begin to imagine what they’re feeling today. All I can say is, I feel sad today as if I knew Steve personally. He was such a big personality in the IT world, and did so much amazing for the industry, the world will feel a smaller place now without him.

The world has lost a great innovator and forward thinker. I write this article on a MacBook Pro. Steve’s restoration of Mac has saved me (and my wife) countless hours of frustration, head banging, hand wringing and overall stress since we made the switch from PC to Mac. No amount of tribute here can express how grateful we are for that.

RIP Steve Jobs, you will be sorely missed, but never forgotten.

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I’ve also never been a big believer that using Disk Utility to ‘Fix Permissions’ was a necessary thing either – but let me put that one to bed right now. I ran Verify Permissions and discovered that I actually needed to run Verify Disk too. Doing this alone sped up the Mac and seemed to make it more reliable. But by now I had already downloaded MacKeeper and decided to have a look anyway.

The first thing that struck me was how fantastic their support team are. I contacted them about an issue and they had it resolved within minutes. The live chat function being extremely useful for me to get in touch with them, and of course means no expensive international phone calls required.

MacKeeper comes with a raft of features that make it very worth the $38 per Mac (depending on which version you go for) including an innovative anti-theft idea which uses the built in iSight camera of a MacBook Pro to take a picture of a thief and utilising wireless networking location features (if available) to assist with locating the MacBook and enabling you to pass as much info as possible to the police to help recover the laptop. Thankfully I’ve not needed to use this as yet! I don’t normally link to articles on the publishers website, but this one is just a bit too interesting not to. Have a look over here, after you finish the review!

One area that Mac users can often become a little complacent is that of Anti Virus. Everyone who uses PCs recognises that they need to use AV software in order to minimise the likelihood of their banking details being handed over to undesirable people – but most people believe Macs to be invulnerable. That’s a myth. Whilst Macs are considerably more difficult for the average ‘script kiddy’ to compromise, there are still some rogue applications and programmers out there and as Mac becomes more and more popular it’s likely that attempts to release viruses and malware into the mac world will also become more popular. MacKeeper comes with an anti-virus solution and at $38 for a year, that’s already about half price from the windows variants.

Antivirus Scanner in Operation

The anti-virus screen is fairly simplistic, but functional and has everything it needs to have (see screenshot linked to the right). My initial reaction to running a full system scan is that it appears to be insanely slow when compared to Windows antivirus solutions. I suspect it’s doing a fine job, and if you’re running it in the background it doesn’t seem to affect the performance of the machine (which Windows AV Scans can be susceptible to) but at the rate it’s going, it’ll take something like 4 days to scan my whole MacBook. I’m not sure that will be in any way useful so I may seek some feedback from Zeobit on this. Fortunately the antivirus scan continues in the background so you can still use other features of MacKeeper while it’s running.

Undelete Screenshot

Another potentially extremely useful feature of MacKeeper that I really wish I had last week is an Undelete tool. In my particular case, I needed to retrieve a Microsoft Word document that the Autosaver had saved, but because I stupidly said ‘No’ when it asked if I wanted to autorecover after a crash, Word (dutifully and correctly) deleted it. My original document was gone, and so was the autosaved recovery version. If I had’ve had this feature at that time I could’ve easily recovered my Uni assignment instead of re-typing it all!

Using the undelete feature is simple – choose the disk you think your file should be on and press the Start Scan button. MacKeeper will then scan that disk looking for lost files and present you with a tickbox list of the files it finds. It’ll also categorise them, although I’m not sure how accurate this categorisation is. Also, my scan failed with an ‘Unknown error occurred’ but that may be because I was still running the virus scan that I started hours ago. One thing to note here is that you cannot undelete a file to the same disk which seems odd, but not a showstopper. I assume you can plug in a USB key and restore your files to that disk instead though.

There’s a whole slew of other features under the title of Data Control but I’ve not had cause to use any of those as yet. One that I will be investigating (and possibly creating a new review for it, or adding to this one) is the Backup and/or ZeoDisk feature. But for now, I am leaving those alone as I want to move on to some of the other particularly useful features.

Under the Cleaning category – which is why I originally wanted MacKeeper in the first place – is the Binaries Cutter. This is an area of Mac that probably eludes most people because most people really don’t need to know about it. Before I can go into too much detail, some history is necessary. Back in 2006, Apple switched the hardware platform upon which Macintosh was based from PowerPC to Intel. In most areas that doesn’t cause too much of a problem because access to the hardware directly is forbidden by programs and any access to the hardware must go through specific operating system calls. But in one area there is a problem and that’s the machine code (the 0′s and 1′s) are specific to the processor type that a program is compiled for. Basically, PowerPC and Intel speak completely different languages so programs written for one can’t run on the other.

If that confuses you, don’t panic. It simply means that there’s two types of programs available for Macs. The old (legacy) PowerPC version, or the new Intel version. Fortunately, Apple are clever and they realised that people wouldn’t want to have to figure out which type of Mac they have, so they created a system they call ‘Universal Binary’ which essentially means that you have two programs in one for every program you buy. That means a Universal Binary will run on either the old PowerPC architecture or the new Intel architecture. That flexibility comes at a price though. Every universal binary has two sets of machine code stored inside it, and one of them will never ever be used. So if you’re an Intel Mac user, you’ve got all that space that’s been included for PowerPC users.

Binaries Cutter removes the un-needed portions of the Universal Binary, freeing up disk space (and probably, although I’m not entirely sure) making the program launch quicker since there’s less work for the Mac to do now that one of the program translations has been removed.

And on the note of translations, you may or may not know that your Mac comes with various languages installed – and applications themselves may well come with extra language translations stored inside them. This all takes up extra space, so if you can only speak 1 (or two, or even three) languages, you can clean a lot of space up by removing the various other language translations.

There’s a plethora of other useful utilities, such as the Disk Usage utility which shows you where your disk space is being used, the Duplicates Finder which finds duplicate files (surprise!) and allows you to delete the ones you don’t want. I didn’t find that particularly easy to decide how to use. In some ways I’d like it to just delete the duplicate files, but on the other hand, which one does it choose to delete? So I suspect some manual effort is required to go through and check out which ones to delete. But it’s a handy tool.

Another fantastic part of this toolkit is the Update Tracker which looks at the various applications installed on your system and then goes off (somehow) to find the current version available. If your version is older than the latest, MacKeeper will tell you and will also fire up your web browser to go and fetch the latest version! It’s like the App Store but for all the other apps you bought elsewhere. This on it’s own is also worth the $38 fee.

All in all, my skepticism at the value and necessity of MacKeeper has all but vanished. It’s very easy to use, it’s price point is well worth it, and it has cleaned up my Mac hugely, just with the automatic steps. If I could be bothered to go through the more manual stuff I suspect I could improve the disk space and performance of my mac even further. The only downside I found was the speed of the antivirus scan – which really is quite ridiculously slow.

MacKeeper is the app that you never realised you needed, but once you get it, you’ll wonder how your Mac survived without it.

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Then there’s the post processing software. Most people recommend PhotoShop if you can afford it, or perhaps the Gimp if free software is your thing. Both of these just about require a degree in photo image manipulation in order to achieve anything like satisfactory results. I simply don’t bother because playing with either of those packages just ruins my photos and so there’s little point.

But recently I was invited to try VeprIT Photo Sense with a view to putting a review up here. As an amateur photographer who’s trying to learn the finer manipulations I found Photo Sense was extremely easy to use. Indeed, it makes all the decisions for you. But as is the case with software that requires a human eye for validation, it doesn’t always get it right. In the examples I tried, most of them ended up not really being all that improved. Some of them were over lightened and made the people in the photos look like they were having some low blood pressure issues. In some cases the colours were just completely messed up.

Having said that, in some photos it did do quite a good job at improving the colours and even sharpening my poor focussing quality. One of the photos I played with was of a Border Collie and Photo Sense actually made a very good job of improving the photo. The Collie’s coat really shone after the post processing (and in reality it did too) whereas my photo looked dull and washed out. So clearly on some photos it can do a really good job.

It’s very easy to use, simply drag and drop the photos from either your Finder or even from iPhoto and within a few seconds Photo Sense had worked its magic and significantly improved the colours and fleshtones on the photo of my baby.

One mildly annoying oversight of the developers is the lack of support for standard OSX gestures from the Trackpad. For example, you have to click on a -+ bar in order to zoom in and pinching on the Trackpad doesn’t do anything. Three fingered swipes does move the zoomed in image around, I’m not sure whether that’s OSX making that happen or whether it’s Photo Sense. But pinching zoom would definitely seem a logical way of doing things.

If you don’t like the way Photo Sense has manipulated your photo you can adjust the processing options to some degree, but it seems to be very much a switch on or off facility rather than specifying actual changes.

All in all though, for someone who doesn’t want to learn all the different parts of PhotoShop and ends up making a muck up of it (such as me) it’s fair to say that Photo Sense can improve photos for you – and if it can’t then you can just leave the photo alone! It might also be accurate to say that if you use RAW images instead of JPGS (RAWs would have much more editing capacity left in them) then Photo Sense may well make a better job of them too.

For the 22 Euro price tag, Photo Sense is significantly cheaper than PhotoShop and does all the hard yards for you. If you’re an amateur photographer it’s worth a look. They provide a free demo version so you can check that it does what you want before you part with your 22 euros anyway.

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