AJ & Kasia’s Weblog

Filed under: Macworld, Software

After a public beta that started at Macworld Expo 2008, Nolobe today shipped Iris, a new image editing application for Mac OS X. Nolobe is the same company that brings the world Interarchy, a popular advanced FTP client.

What separates Iris from the competition is the single-screen user interface that dispenses with a lot of the traditional floating palettes that clutter screens with other applications. While it’s a 1.0 release, a quick tour of the trial download shows that Iris is a surprisingly full-featured image editor supporting most major file formats, advanced compositing tools, and color correction machinery that lets you fix or enhance your favorite photos.

Iris requires Leopard, and can be purchased from Nolobe for $79. If you’d like to take Iris for a spin, download the free trial.

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Filed under: Accessories, Hardware, Peripherals

Do you need a bus-powered 1 TB hard disk? You’re in luck – LaCie announced the Little Big Disk Quadra today.

Available in early July, the Little Big Disk Quadra uses a pair of drives in a RAID 0 configuration for speedy response. My personal concern is that if one of the two RAID drives goes out, you’d lose all of the data in the array. Although LaCie states that it’s “Compatible with Time Machine“, the Little Big Disk Quadra is probably better-suited as a scratch drive for video work on the go.

This is a tiny drive considering the capacity – the outside dimensions are 1.6 x 3.3 x 5.5 in. (40 x 85 x 140 mm) and it tips the scales at 1.4 lbs (650 g). You don’t need to use the included AC adapter when using the Little Big Disk Quadra with FireWire 400 or 800, but you will need it when using the drive with eSATA or USB 2.0.

Some sites are stating immediate availability, but LaCie has confirmed that it will be several weeks before the Little Big Disk is available.

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Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Graphic Design

PopChar X, the little utility that gets all of those funky symbols, accents, and other special characters into your documents without having to remember arcane key codes, has been updated to version 4 for Mac.

PopChar has been around for over 20 years and is a favorite of editors and designers. To type a special character, you click on a P in the menu bar and a list of characters appears. Selecting the character you want drops it into your current document. Sure, you could always use Apple’s Character Palette tool, but it’s slow, and difficult to search for a special character in a particular font.

PopChar X 4.0 adds a new feature for searching Unicode characters by name across font boundaries. Ergonis, developer of PopChar, provides an example of searching for a “cubic meters” symbol in Helvetica. Typing in “cub” produces no results, but you can click a new “All” button to search across all Unicode fonts.

You can download a trial version of PopChar X 4.0, or purchase it online from Ergonis for €29.99. Multiple license packs are available at a discount.

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