- Joined
- May 9, 2003
- Posts
- 4,705
It's been a while since we've had a Mac user powwow on NG.com, so I thought I'd see what fellow Mac peeps are using to get work done.
Dragoman - by Creativebe
For: OS X
This app has been a godsend for me lately. It's a batch file converter, and while there are literally hundreds of these for Macs and PCs, Dragoman is interesting and unique for a couple of reasons.
1. It can batch convert almost anything. MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, Olympus RAW to JPEG, TIFF to PDF, and a lot more. For photos, it even keeps the EXIF data. My workflow involves 80% Mac and 20% Linux day to day, so being able to batch convert large numbers of text files and photos is really helpful.
2. It does it really quickly.
3. It's free as in beer.
Pixen3 - the opensword group
For: OS X
Pixen is a really cool drawing app that lets you make raster art and sprites. I know a couple of iPhone game developers who've used it to create sprites for retro style games and it's a lot of fun to use. You can make animated gifs or MOV files (annoying, but cool nonetheless) too.
It's particularly cool if you want to neo-geo-fy yourself for an avatar, or if you wanna start hacking ROMs and other geekery. It's also free as in beer.
ComicZeal - by bitolithic
For: iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad
ComicZeal is by far my favorite comic reader app for iPhone OS. It has a pretty good interface, is really responsive, and will optimize your comics for viewing on the iPhone/iPod Touch's smaller screen. It takes cbr, cbz, rar, zip, pdf, and if you point it a folder full of jpegs it'll turn them into a comic. If you have collections, you can "box" them within the app for easier navigation.
For me, I'm just getting back into comics, I'm diving into Robert Kirkman's work (Invincible, to be exact) as we speak, and this app has made it really easy to pick up and read when I get a moment. The only downsides are that synching can be a bit cumbersome, though now you can sync comics through iTunes which is better than it was before. For some reason, after you sync them, the iPad version needs to format the comics and this takes a surprisingly long time...like 40 seconds per comic...so dumping a big collection can take a bit. From what I understand though they have it fixed in the next version. Finally, it's a tad expensive. $4 bucks for iPhone/iPod Touch, and $8 for iPad. But, in my opinion, it's well worth it.
How about you guys?
Right now, I'm currently shopping for good, simple word processors. I'm using OpenOffice.org and iWork off and on, and they work wonderfully, but both are more resource intensive than they need to be. A good, free or cheap text editor would make my day MUCH better.
Dragoman - by Creativebe
For: OS X
This app has been a godsend for me lately. It's a batch file converter, and while there are literally hundreds of these for Macs and PCs, Dragoman is interesting and unique for a couple of reasons.
1. It can batch convert almost anything. MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, Olympus RAW to JPEG, TIFF to PDF, and a lot more. For photos, it even keeps the EXIF data. My workflow involves 80% Mac and 20% Linux day to day, so being able to batch convert large numbers of text files and photos is really helpful.
2. It does it really quickly.
3. It's free as in beer.
Pixen3 - the opensword group
For: OS X
Pixen is a really cool drawing app that lets you make raster art and sprites. I know a couple of iPhone game developers who've used it to create sprites for retro style games and it's a lot of fun to use. You can make animated gifs or MOV files (annoying, but cool nonetheless) too.
It's particularly cool if you want to neo-geo-fy yourself for an avatar, or if you wanna start hacking ROMs and other geekery. It's also free as in beer.
ComicZeal - by bitolithic
For: iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad
ComicZeal is by far my favorite comic reader app for iPhone OS. It has a pretty good interface, is really responsive, and will optimize your comics for viewing on the iPhone/iPod Touch's smaller screen. It takes cbr, cbz, rar, zip, pdf, and if you point it a folder full of jpegs it'll turn them into a comic. If you have collections, you can "box" them within the app for easier navigation.
For me, I'm just getting back into comics, I'm diving into Robert Kirkman's work (Invincible, to be exact) as we speak, and this app has made it really easy to pick up and read when I get a moment. The only downsides are that synching can be a bit cumbersome, though now you can sync comics through iTunes which is better than it was before. For some reason, after you sync them, the iPad version needs to format the comics and this takes a surprisingly long time...like 40 seconds per comic...so dumping a big collection can take a bit. From what I understand though they have it fixed in the next version. Finally, it's a tad expensive. $4 bucks for iPhone/iPod Touch, and $8 for iPad. But, in my opinion, it's well worth it.
How about you guys?
Right now, I'm currently shopping for good, simple word processors. I'm using OpenOffice.org and iWork off and on, and they work wonderfully, but both are more resource intensive than they need to be. A good, free or cheap text editor would make my day MUCH better.
