(Credit: CNET Networks)Probably the most popular pro-level database maker for the Mac, FileMaker Pro has just released a major update to coincide with Macworld 2009. Offering a sleek new interface that's as nice to look at as it is intuitive, FileMaker Pro's new Status Toolbar puts commonly used features right where you need them. Even if you're not happy with the default layout of the new toolbar, you can easily customize the available icons to improve workflow for specific projects.
The status bar puts your most used tools right at the top of the screen for easy access
(Credit: CNET Networks)The new browse feature gives you a centralized location for navigating to different parts of your database quickly. You'll now have buttons to quickly switch between search, preview, and edit layout modes and switching from Form, List and Table is as easy as a click of your mouse. When you're finished, you can save further time with easy-access buttons to save as PDF or Excel formats. Other new features include Saved Finds, making it easy to get to your favorite find requests quickly; new themes and templates to give your databases the look you want; and a new resource center with hands-on instructional videos for when you hit roadblocks.
Quickly switch between modes with convenient buttons located in the Status Toolbar
(Credit: CNET Networks)Available now for $299, FileMaker Pro 10 is a must-have for those who spend their time working with databases. With features to streamline database navigation, offer easy access to search, preview, and edit modes, and shortcuts to get you where you need to go quickly, we think this update is worth the money for saving you time so you can move on to the next big project.
- Topics:
- Office Software,
- Utilities and drivers,
- Mac Software
- Tags:
- FileMaker,
- Database,
- Macworld 2009,
- Update
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(Credit: CNET)If you're one whose search results lead you to a Wikipedia page nine times out of ten, you would do well to install the Googlepedia extension for Firefox.
This free, terrifically easy add-on pulls the Wikipedia article most closely associated with your search term into the right half of a Google search results page. Modest controls let you expand, shrink, or hide the article.
Here's the best part: clicking a link within the article feeds the term back into Google's search engine, and therefore back into Googlepedia's cycle of serving up Wikipedia articles.
Googlepedia will undoubtedly save you time if a quick search is all you need. If you're one to submit to Wikipedia's siren call of never-ending knowledge, download at your own risk.
- Topics:
- Browsers and extensions
- Tags:
- Googlepedia,
- Google,
- Wikipedia,
- Firefox,
- search result,
- article
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(Credit: CBS Interactive)An iPhone is many things, but a massage therapist it is not.
However, if you're in a pinch, the lightweight application Massager may soothe you until your next appointment.
The application takes advantage of the iPhone's vibrating motor to create four patterns based on Swedish, Shiatsu, deep muscle, and relaxation massage. Starting and stopping the massage are easy enough to accomplish by tapping and untapping the corresponding button.
While you can manually increase the intensity of the vibes by putting some muscle behind the iPhone's flat face, it still won't come close to what a pronged handheld massager can do. After a few minutes, my wound-up shoulders remained just as tight.
Yet it might relax tension in you and yours, and at 99 cents, that's not a bad gamble.
Opera's updated software kit for consumer electronics could mean better browsing on the Wii.
Read the full post at CNET's CES 2009 blog.
Scott Cook demos new TurboTax for Mac at MacWorld.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CBS Interactive)I spied Scott Cook, a founder and former CEO of Intuit, which makes Quicken and Quickbooks, at his company's Macworld booth, giving demos just like any booth worker.
That's curious--you don't see big company billionaires mingling with consumers in a frenzied trade show environment too often (although you should). So I snared him for a quick interview about his booth duty and the plans for Intuit overall.
Regarding hanging out with The People, Cook simply said that it's a great way to get customers to talk to him for free (versus paid surveys, I assume) and that it's good to hear what you are doing wrong (as a Quicken for Windows user, I could give have given him an earful, but time was short). He also likes to see how his team presents to customers.
On Intuit's overall strategy, Cook says Intuit is pursuing a strategy based around online and mobile access to financial data. U.S. consumers spend $7 billion a year in overdraft fees, he says, and there's no excuse for that when your phone could alert you when you're about to overextend yourself. Thus: Quicken Beam, Quicken Online (which recently got a refresh), and an online version of the small business app Quickbooks. There's also an online version of TurboTax, which will compute and file your federal taxes for free. State returns are extra, though.
Quicken Mobile gives you quick visibility in your basic financial position.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CBS Interactive)At the same time, Intuit seems to be renewing its commitment to standalone apps, or at least to the Mac.
Quicken for Mac is being retired in favor of a newly built financial management app called Financial Life, now in a very early public beta. It looks, at first glance, like a nicely designed version of Quicken, simpler to get in to than the company's traditional software. (On Windows, Quicken 2009 looks like a typical upgrade for Intuit from Quicken 2008: a few new features, but according to user reviews, lacking needed reliability improvements.)
Yet despite Cook's mission to offer holistic financial suites for its users, Intuit is not yet delivering on integration between its products. For example, if you use Quicken Mobile to update your Quicken Online account, that data won't make it into your Quicken software installation on your personal computer. And data files cannot be shared between Mac and Windows installations.
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- Windows Software,
- Mac Software
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If you're a keyboard shortcut junkie in Google Reader, Gmail and Google Docs you might have noticed Google.com, the mother of all Google services, is a bit lacking in the keyboard shortcuts department. There is currently an official Google-sanctioned experimental keyboard shortcuts program you can opt into, although there's the slight chance that the company may one day kill it off. That and it won't remember to give you the shortcut keys the next time you search if you're not signed in to your Google account.
If both of these things are holding you back from keyboard shortcut dominance, worth downloading is Janakan Arulkumarasan's Google Keyboard Shortcuts extension for Firefox. When installed you can simply use your arrow keys to sift through the results, which get highlighted in a lovely pallid yellow. There are two ways to open up the result links: you can either hit enter, which opens the link in a new window, or enter plus control which opens it up in a new tab. The extension trumps Google's own keyboard shortcuts program in this regard.
As with many of the other neat extensions we've blogged about recently, Google Keyboard Shortcuts is experimental, which means you have to be registered with Mozilla's add-ons site to download it.
Once installed the Google Keyboard Shortcuts extension lets you browse through search results using your arrow keys.
(Credit: CNET Networks)- Topics:
- Browsers and extensions
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At the Macworld 2009 keynote presentation this morning given by Phill Schiller (Steve Jobs was absent this year due to widely reported health issues), one of the more exciting new software developments was to the iLife suite of software for Mac.
(Credit: Apple)Long touted as the comprehensive suite from Apple to manage your digital lifestyle, iLife includes the popular Mac apps iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iDVD, and iWeb. Over the course of the speech, several enhancements to each software were given screen time, and many of the new features were those long requested by fans as well as innovative new features from Apple's developers.
New enhancements to iPhoto included two new ways to organize photos. Faces, which includes face recognition technology, lets users search across folders of photos by matching with the face of a friend or family member to get all the images that include a specific person. Places uses the location technology now available in iPhone 3G and in some digital cameras to organize where your pictures were taken. Along with the new search and organization capabilities, iPhoto now lets you quickly post to Flickr and Facebook, offers more advanced image-editing tools, and lets you illustrate your vacation photos using a slick-looking feature called Travel Maps. The Travel maps can also be used to make photo books using Apple's previously announced paid photo album making features.
iMovie also received several new features and enhancement tweaks including more themes to give your movies a different, elegant feel and a precision editor for more professional-looking digital movies. One of the more amazing parts of the keynote speech was the demonstration of iMovie's new video stabilization features which takes a user's shaky handheld video recording and makes it a almost as smooth as if the camera were riding on a rail. New title fonts and transition effects will delight iMovie hobbyists and a new browser makes it easy to find the recordings you want for your movie.
One of the more interesting feature enhancements involved GarageBand's new learn-to-play instrument features. Interactive piano and guitar lessons let you learn at your own pace, showing finger positions and HD videos of instructions so you can practice playing along. But the more interesting addition was the ability to learn songs from the actual artists who played them. Artist lessons (sold separately) lets you learn songs by watching videos of the artists themselves as they take you through the process of playing some of their songs. Famous artists like Nora Jones, Sting, Ben Folds, Sarah McLachlan, and others take you through each step. New sounds and amps were also included in the update to give you more variety in your music.
The iWeb application added better drag-and-drop Web design capabilities and several dynamic widgets you could include on your Web site. Improved features included easier page management and publishing options as well as fun additions like the ability to notify your Facebook friends when your site has been updated.
Overall, we think the expanded feature list for each program and usability tweaks make this updated suite worth looking into if you have interest in this project- and hobbyist-based suite. Single users who already own iLife '08 will be able to update for $79, and if you want to be able to install it on up to five computers, you can get the family pack for $99. iLife '09 will only work if you have Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard installed, so those with older systems might like the Mac Box Set, which includes iLife '09, Leopard, and iWork '09 all in one box for $169. iLife '09 will become available at the end of January.
- Topics:
- Digital photography,
- Audio/MP3,
- Design,
- Video,
- Mac Software
- Tags:
- Macworld 2009,
- Apple,
- iLife,
- iMovie,
- iDVD,
- iWeb,
- GarageBand
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Mp3tag makes it simple to edit batches of MP3 files.
According to a recent New York Times article, 80 percent of people who make New Year's resolutions abandon them before Valentine's Day. But we can all beat the odds, right?
This year, I'm hoping to make some sense of my digital music collection. I'm a big fan of the audio-tracking site Last.fm (my username is "field_day" if you want to friend me), but I'll often get an error when trying to "scrobble" a song because my ID3 information is missing or erroneous.
ID3 is a metadata format within MP3 files that can store a song's title, artist, album, track number, genre, year, and other useful data. And editing that info song by song in iTunes, Winamp, MediaMonkey, or other music players can be a real pain in the butt.
Enter the batch taggers. These software programs make it much easier to edit multiple MP3 files at once. One of the most popular, Mp3tag, was a Featured Freeware selection back in August 2008, and TagScanner is another top-rated and popular freeware option. Among the shareware solutions, TagTuner offers a full 30-day trial and includes one unique and critical feature: the ability to roll back any batch changes.
Will 2009 be the year I finally get my MP3 act together? I certainly hope so. If you have any expert advice on organizing digital music or cleaning up my ID3 tags, tell me about it in the comments.
- Topics:
- Windows Software,
- Audio/MP3
- Tags:
- windows software,
- music,
- MP3,
- ID3,
- tags,
- Mp3tag,
- TagScanner,
- TagTuner
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(Credit: Fring)Windows Mobile may be an ugly stepchild of mobile platforms, but among more ambitious publishers, it hasn't been forgotten.
Months after adding file transferring abilities to its Symbian version, Fring, a free VoIP communication company, is conferring this and other features to an updated versions of Fring for Windows Mobile.
In addition to sending images, audio, and video files to friends on Skype, SIP, Yahoo, Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, and ICQ, the latest version of Fring for Windows Mobile also packs on support for add-ons, an indicator message as contacts type out an IM response, and long-overdue privacy settings.
The interface is also freshened, and owners of recent HTC phones like the Touch Diamond will get to speak to pals on VoIP from their earpieces, particularly useful when driving.
Windows Mobile users are going to like the sudden attention, but those who have switched to BlackBerry are going to wonder where the love is.
- Topics:
- Mobile Software
- Tags:
- Fring,
- Windows Mobile,
- VoIP,
- telephony,
- Skype
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The Internet telephony company Truphone has turned its client for the iPhone and iPod Touch (download) into an aggregator for a range of popular VoIP and instant-messaging applications.
Truphone announced the new functionality on Tuesday at the Macworld 2009 expo in San Francisco. Starting next Monday, all Truphone subscribers using one of Apple's handhelds will be able to use the free client for Skype, Twitter, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger two-way communications.
Truphone's users have already been able to use Google Talk voice chat functionality, but they will now be able to make calls to their MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Skype contacts as well. The company's chief executive, Geraldine Wilson, said in a statement that the features would let Truphone's customers "choose which mode of communications they want to use at any moment--all from within the one application."
"This represents another step toward making Truphone the open 'all-in-one conversations hub' for iPhone and iPod Touch users," Wilson said.
Calls between Truphone and Skype will be free over Wi-Fi, and will cost the price of a local call over the handset's cellular connection. As the iPhone is usually sold with an 'unlimited' data plan, instant messages should not cost anything above that flat fee, unless the user is roaming internationally.
Truphone also produces clients for Nokia and BlackBerry smartphones.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
- Topics:
- Mobile Software,
- Chat and e-mail
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