Mac Mode

Have been dreadfully behind on updating what I’m doing with my Mac over the last year, but one new and somewhat major change is the Mac is no longer beside me every day.

Now it’s in our music room, keeping an eye on our music gear with the faithful, reliable iSight camera [freeware EyeSight software] and doubling as a picture rotator with the built-in scrensaver and iPhoto.

Another change, at least for this post, is that I’m blogging this from within Windows Vista using Windows Live Writer.

[shock! horror!]

Seriously, I’d like to investigate some similar Mac blogging tools like Ecto. A few of my Mac blogging friends seem happy with that program and I’m curious if it makes blogging on the Mac as easy as Windows Live Writer does on the PC.

Create and share your own comics with Comic Life which is published by freeverse. It’s as easy as dragging, dropping, selecting and typing. It took me 30 minutes to create the comic shown below with zero prior experience:

I saw Comic Life at the local Megastore and was surprised to see the following testimonial as the top of box blurb: “Runs well, looks amazing, and does something so incredibly unique.” - Chris Pirillo, lockergnome.com. How about that Chris, you are a box star?!

I laid down the $29.99 (it’s only $24.99 if you buy from their website, I discovered later — doh) and took it home planning to install and check out when I had a few minutes.

After carefully knifing open the contents — the comic makes it look like this is some kind of struggle, but thats all in good fun — I removed the CD and stuck it into the eMac drive. Just had to drag the folder over to the desktop and then click on the CL icon to enter in the Comic Life code (found on the front of the instruction manual.

From there it’s a matter of choosing a comic template, dragging and dropping pictures from iPhoto or elsewhere on your Mac, adding captions and text, modifying the design and voila, you’ll have a comic created. The last step is exporting to a format that can be shared with others. It can be exported as an HTML document, images, directly to a .Mac account or even as a quicktime movie.

Any application as involved as this that lets a complete newcomer create something cool in 30 minutes or less is better than waiting for pizza to arrive.

Macworld gave this 4 1/2 mice. This is a well designed and implemented application, especially for creative types (my mind is whirring with ideas!). Plasq created Comic Life [official plasq RSS feed].

I’m trying out GIMPshop .2b for working with the pictures I took and imported with iPhoto.

GIMPShop is a hack of the open-source photo editor, the Gimp, to make it look and act very much like Photoshop.

Soon, very soon the Tiger stuff is going to start being posted. I’ve been playing around with some of the new Tiger features.