Seashore is a great, free, program!

Seashore features:

• gradients,
• textures and
• anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes.

It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP’s technology and uses the same native file format.

However, unlike the GIMP, Seashore only aims to serve the basic image editing needs of most computer users, not to provide a replacement for professional image editing products.

Seashore was created by Mark Pazolli who led the project until the end of 2009.

You can learn more or download it at: http://seashore.sourceforge.net.

Outlook 2 Mac, by Little Machines, transfers Windows Outlook Mail & Folders to Your Mac!

Outlook 2 Mac (O2M) works with Outlook 97, 98, 2000, 2002, 2003, and the new 2007 on the most recent versions of Windows.

It also:

• Lets you choose which Outlook folders to export, and how.
• Lets you export all of your e-mail and calendar items, or
• Performs incremental exports by specifying a date range.

In terms of technical details, check this out — O2M:

• Exports Your PC’s Microsoft Outlook Email, Email Attachments, Contacts, and Calendar Appointments to Portable Macintosh-Compatible Files You Can Import Into Apple Mail, Address Book, iCal, Microsoft Entourage, and Other Third-Party Programs
• Creates Industry-Standard mbox, vcf (vCard), and ics (iCal) Formats
• Easy-to-Use Wizard Lets You Choose Folders to Export, Export Options and Filters, and More
• Attachments Can Be Saved into Emails, Separately as Detached Files, or Stripped Out Entirely
• Preserves Disk Space — Attachments Can Be Filtered Out by File Type and/or Size
• Performs Incremental Exports — Specify a Date Range of Emails or Calendar Items to Export
• Details of Each Export Are Clearly Captured to Log File
• Compatible with Stand-Alone PCs or PCs Using Microsoft Exchange Serve
• Includes User Guide and FAQ with Instructions for Importing into Popular Mac Programs
• Includes Free O2M Upgrades
• Includes Free Limited Technical Support by Email

Visit www.LittleMachines.com to learn how about Outlook to Mac mail conversion.

If you’re an Office 2004 Mac user, and you want to open the newer Office 2007 (Windows), and Office 2008 (Mac) documents — Microsoft provides this tool:

It’s called the “Open XML File Format Converter for Mac“, and it:

Open XML Converter allows you to convert Open XML files that were created in Office 2008 for Mac or Office 2007 for Windows so that you can open, edit, and save them in earlier versions of Office for Mac. Open XML Converter can convert Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations that are in the Open XML Format so that you can open and edit the files in Office 2004 for Mac and Office v. X for Mac. You can choose to convert and open one file, or convert a large number of files.

If you use Office 2004 – open 2007/2008 docs by downloading the converter here.

Usually, an option like that would appear in the Save As screen…

However, with Pages, it’s a little different.

Here’s how to save a Word document in Pages:

1. Click “File” on the Menu.
2. Click “Export”.
3. Select “Word”, and press Next…
4. Type the filename of your document (and select where you want to save it!)
5. Click “Export”.

There you go!  That’s all there is to it.

Enjoy!

What is Max?

Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files.

It can extract audio files from CDs, and then generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including:

• MP3
• Ogg Vorbis
• AAC
• Apple Lossless
• Monkey’s Audio
• WavPack
• Speex
• AIFF
• WAVE

Max provides extremely high quality output, and is completely free as well!

Visit www.sbooth.org/Max to learn & see more!

xAct for FLAC

xACT stands for X Audio Compression Toolkit, and it’s one of the best ways to create and extract FLAC on the Mac.

It is a GUI based front end written in AppleScript Studio for the Unix applications Shorten, shntool, monkey’s audio compressor, flac, and cdda2wav with paranoia support. It also uses a modified md5sum and sox. It does the basic commands of these applications and adds a few features to speed up productivity in creation of etree.org standard filesets.

Enjoy!

Transmission is your best bet!

It’s easy, lean, powerful, and native to Mac OS X for fast performance!

Best of all, it’s completely free.

Visit www.transmissionbt.com to learn more.

All Mac’s have a built in Speech Synthesis manager, and you can make your Mac talk by doing this:

1. Click on Spotlight in the Upper Right (or use the keyboard shortcut – Command + Space).
2. Type “Terminal”, you should see the Application “Terminal” become the Top Hit.
3. If Terminal is highlighted, press Return.  If not, select it by using your arrows, and press Return.
4. You should see the Terminal application start, and be dumped at a textual screen prompt.
5. At that prompt, type: say “Hello there” and press Return.
6. You should hear your Mac talk to you.
7. Once you are done, you can either type “exit” and press Return, or use the keyboard shortcut to Quit (Command + Q) Terminal.

The “say” command has more advanced uses too:

• You can have your Mac read a text file to you: say -f filetoread.txt.
• You can have your Mac convert a text file into an audio file: say -o soundfile.aiff -f filetoread.txt.

If you’re feeling really geeky, and want to learn all about the “say” command, type “man say” at the prompt in Terminal — that will open up the manual page of “say”, and teach you all about it!

Enjoy!

If you want your Dashboard disabled, here’s how to do it:

1. Click on Spotlight in the Upper Right.
2. Type “Terminal”, you should see the Application “Terminal” become the Top Hit.
3. If Terminal is highlighted, press Return.  If not, select it by using your arrows, and press Return.
4. You should see the Terminal application start, and be dumped at a textual screen prompt.
5. At that prompt, type “defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES” and press Return.
6. When the prompt reappears, type “killall Dock” to make the change happen.
7. Once it’s done, you can either type “exit” and press Return, or use the keyboard shortcut to Quit (Command + Q) Terminal.

If you ever want to re-enable your Dashboard, simply enter the command in line 5 above replacing YES with NO.  Also, type line 6 to make the change happen immediately.

Enjoy!

Read “How to take screenshots on macs” to learn more about taking screenshots.

To change Mac OS Screenshot file format, simply:

1. Click on Spotlight in the Upper Right.
2. Type “Terminal”, you should see the Application “Terminal” become the Top Hit.
3. If Terminal is highlighted, press Return.  If not, select it by using your arrows, and press Return.
4. You should see the Terminal application start, and be dumped at a textual screen prompt.
5. At that prompt, type “defaults write com.apple.screencapture type PDF” and press Return to change the default format to PDF.  You substitute JPG, or GIF for PDF to make one of those formats the default.
6. Once it’s done, you can either type “exit” and press Return, or use the keyboard shortcut to Quit (Command + Q) Terminal.

If you have any questions, please feel free to Contact Me.  Enjoy!