Appletell

Pixelmator, which claims to be “Image editing for the rest of us,” comes full of all sorts of different features for a relatively small price ($59.00) compared to other graphic design/image software of this nature such as Aperture and Photoshop.  If what the app contained before wasn’t enough to cause you to buy it, the new update may help.  The Pixelmator team has now released version 1.2 Draftsman of it’s beautiful, GPU powered image editor that comes as a free update for people who already use the product.  One of the key features in this update is new rulers tool.  This tool allows users to have even more control of the alignment on the layers and includes many different units such as pixels and centimeters.  This update also comes with the usual bug fixes as well as an addition of some more Automator actions.

Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team says, “Pixelmator opened the door for all users to explore their imaginative side through image creation, editing, and enhancement.  Now with powerful, but easy-to-use rulers, guides, curves, auto enhance, color balance, and polygonal lasso tools, Pixelmator provides users with an even wider range of creative opportunities.” Sounds great to me.

If you own Pixelmator and have downloaded the new version, let us know how it is.  The new features sounds extremely great and useful, and we love to hear your feedback!

Apple’s popular, $1,299 video editing software Final Cut has now reached the 1 million licenses sold mark.  It took eight years for Apple to reach this mark but with the recent addition of Final Cut Server, it doesn’t seem like Apple plans on stopping anytime soon.  This news comes shortly after NAB rumors that stated Apple had plans to rid of its Final Cut software.  However, that rumor was put to rest when Richard Townhill, Apple’s video marketing director, says, “I can categorically state, on the record, that is not the case.” Final Cut is going nowhere but up.

On top of this good news research specialist SCRI reported that Apple took 49% of the US professional editing marketing with this product in 2007.  It appears the Final Cut is becoming a widely used application by amateurs and professionals alike.  Its good to see one of Apple’s products doing so well in this market, and I look forward to seeing more people use this software.

Via [TVBEurope]

For Web designers who need to upload things they make in photoshop, there is a a new easy plug-in for Photoshop called SiteGrinder 2 that lets you convert documents directly to Cascade Style Sheet (CSS) code right in Photoshop.  Both the basic and the pro versions the ability to upload everything from videos and slideshows to flash animations and interactive menus directly to a website, while keeping the same layouts and design exactly as it would appear in Photoshop

“We’re very excited to be releasing SiteGrinder 2 for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard,” said Thomas Summerall, co-founder and President of Media Lab, Inc. “SiteGrinder 2 puts extremely powerful and easy-to-use webpage creation capabilities in the hands of our customers, letting them focus exclusively on their designs rather than on confusing webpage code. SiteGrinder 2 lets customers take ownership of their websites like never before, and at an extremely reasonable price point”.  The program costs $129 and $349 for basic and pro respectively. Media Lab, inc. and Sitegrinder have quite the reputation (Media Lab’s products, including SiteGrinder, have been used in multiple Hollywood movies, along with productions at Disney World), so hopefully the product will live up to its name.

Via [MacMegasite]

Famous modder Ben Heckendorn is at it again, this time with an Apple IIgs laptop.  This laptop is very impressive, and although it may seem dangerous, Ben said it gives off just about as much heat as a pocket calculator (calculators give off heat?).  Here are the full specs:

• 15-inch screen
• Original Apple IIgs motherboard
• Custom acrylic keyboard with laser etched keys
• Compact Flash adapter as the hard drive
• Side port access for floppy drive, joystick, and mouse
• Original mouse
• Glowing blue “][” logo
• Built-in stereo speakers

This isn’t Ben’s only awesome creation, be sure to check out his PS3 mod as well.  Also, there are more pictures and a video up on his site.

Leopard’s been out for a while now and if you updated when it came out, you’re probably at a stage where you are a little sick of the system’s icons. Here are some free sets of icons that are fresh and can easily spice up your desktop. I come across a lot of icons, as I not only write for Appletell, but manage MacintoshGUI. We feature a design related goodie everyday, and here are some of the favorites for the past 30 days.

I find that Coda is one of the best tools for web development on the Mac, and the green leaf icon looks really good. After a while, as most things do, it gets a little old, and this set of Coda leaves will hopefully spice up your dock. These are made by Louie Mantia (pictured above), who has some CandyBar replacement icons, so check them out too. (CandyBar is an application that lets you change your system’s icons, dock, and mange a collection of icons.)

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It seems Adobe took Apple’s latest Aperture 2.1 release as a challenge with the release of Lightroom 2 beta. We’re not quite sure when the full version will be released, but the beta version expires on August 31 this year. But, Adobe definitely took a swing at Apple, read for yourself:

“One thing we can say, however, is that we plan to continue with a more aggressive release schedule than we’ve seen from Apple, which took over two years between release of Aperture 1.0 and 2.0.”

The new beta also offers local corrections via the Develop module, which is in direct competition with Aperture 2.1’s new plug-in editing tool. It shows how much Adobe is gunning for Apple. Many worried Adobe would limit Lightroom functionality so Photoshop would still be the number one program, but I believe Lightroom and Photoshop both serve different functions. Lightroom is geared towards organizing photos for professionals, or a standalone app for beginners. The pros will always be using Photoshop, but Lightroom serves a much better process than Bridge.

If you are a licensed user of Lightroom, you can check out the Lightroom 2 Beta and use it until August 31. Adobe seems to be aiming for Apple, so it brings up the question; Will Apple ever create a Photoshop competitor?

Lightroom 2 Beta [Adobe] Read [Ars Technica]

Softpress announced a new version of their flagship web design software for OS X, Freeway 5. The visual page layout-style interface of Freeway is what separates it from other traditional web design software. Its intuitive interface makes graphics and web designers alike feel comfortable using it. Freeway 5 brings some new features, including the ability to create CSS-based menus, Google Actions, dynamic effects from script.aculo.us, sliced background images, new background and graphic effects, save archive, iPhoto integration, color labeling and many more.

Freeway Pro now has multiple output options, a full output encoding choices, color and text style management across the entire document, extended graphic import capabilities, multiple style sheets for each document, full CSS text styling and CSS layout, and more.

Freeway 5 costs $249 for the Pro version and $79 for the Express version. Upgrades from previous releases are available for discounted prices, and you can also download a free trial from their website.

The mEgg Hunt, “brings seasonal fun” where Mac users will surf a Mac developer’s site and try to find an egg. Once they find an egg they’ll receive a code towards 20% off the purchase of the software. The Easter mEgg Hunt just revealed the list of participants, so once you see them, get hunting! (Then reading Apple news)

Read the full list after the jump!

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After releasing an update to Lightroom last week, they are now pulling it from their website and asking users to downgrade.

There are three major bugs. The first is an error with EXIF time stamps. “There is an error in the EXIF time stamp update technology that causes Lightroom to believe that the files are out of sync with the correct time stamp as displayed in Lightroom.” says Adobe. Essentially, it seems that this bug would shift all of your time stamps, which could be wuite a huge pain to return to their previous state.

A Windows only error involves DNG conversion. In Lightroom, Adobe has included technology that ensures the data in a DNG file is unchanged from the time of conversion to DNG. “Unfortunately,” says Adobe, “when converting to DNG using Lightroom 1.4 on Windows, the application will write an incorrect verification tag to describe the image data.” When Lightroom then tries to work with those files, it throws up an error because of it’s own mistake. Adobe recommends using the 1.3.1 converter to reconvert the DNGs if you have already done so with 1.4.

There is also a problem converting Olympus JPEG files in Lightroom 1.4

Users can download version 1.3.1 to downgrade to temporarily by following the link at the end of the article and using the download links there.

Read [Lightroom Journal]

In a very interesting article, BusinessWeek goes over Apple’s Design Strategy and while, Apple TV notwithstanding, they seem to nail it every time.

The article is broken up into the following headers:

Pixel Perfect Mockups
Though is tacks on a lot of time to the beginning, detailed mockups prevent any misunderstanding in the process.

10 to 3 to 1
Apple designers start with 10 entirely different mockups of any given product. This is then narrowed down to 3, then to the final product.

Paired Design Meetings
Design meetings always come in pairs: one to discuss ideas of anything they want to happen with the product, no matter how unrealistic. The second meeting is to weed out the unrealistic ideas and add in more sensible ones if need be.

Pony Meeting
Narrowing down unrealistic ideas that senior management might want in a product into possible ideas is the last part of the process.

Read the article, highly recommended, here.