FOWA is all about webapps, so I was amazed to see a stand that had a cool piece of software running in Mac OS X. The company is Blurb, and their self publishing tool runs on both Windows and Mac. The choice for an offline editor for an online service is interesting but in the end actually quite understanding.

In a time of webapplications that make you order your businesscards using Flickr photos, and order your self published books via Lulu, it has become common practice to have an online editor for these physical products. Still, on the other hand there are tools like iPhoto and Picasa that make it more of a pleasure to use your photo library to make a physical product without doing the editing in a sometimes not perfect webapp. The BookSmart software of Blurb takes the middle road, allowing people to use online and offline libraries to publish via the webservice by Blurb.

The actual really thing that I noticed abotu Blurb was the fact that it is dirty cheap. Melinda and I have been looking at some other websites like QOOP to make a photobook or calendar for our parents for christmas, and the Blurb service is simply way cheaper. The quality is really good, as they had a wide range of their books lying around. They even did the “24 hours of Flickr” book, so the photo quality is guaranteed to be good.A simple softcover (18×18cm, 20-40 pages) photobook that you can style yourself will set you back €9.95, a large hardcover version (33×28cm, 20-40 pages) will cost you about €41,95. Compare this to QOOP this is at least €10 cheaper. More prices can be found here. Shipping is from Amsterdam, and if you use the promo code “FOWA” you will even get the shipping costs for free!

The only problem for now is that I can’t seem to get the BookSmart software to work with iPhoto ‘08, but I have reported the bug. I hope to show my first book someday soon.

The people that follow my personal tech-blog might already know about Mailplane, but I thought it was time to spread the word about Mailplane to a more mature crowd. Mailplane is a Mac OS X application that has Google Mail (Gmail) meet the desktop. It combines the power of a conventional desktop application (like Mail.app) with the flexibility and quality of an online email client.

Explaining the origin of the idea is best let to Ruben Bakker, the creator of the application:

“I really love Gmail. It is superior to Outlook and MS Exchange I experience at work: The Outlook Webclient is a joke, I get more spam than normal messages and server space is so limited I constantly must delete messages” …. “But I missed quite a few features that Mail.app and other traditional mail clients offer. Gmail with its browser interface just didn’t reach my desktop. For example uploading an attachment involved too many steps: Exporting the image from iPhoto, somehow resizing the picture and then attaching it by using the ‘Choose file’ button.”

So what does Mailplane really offer? For me the features and advantages are simple:

1. Gmail in it’s own application, instead of hanging around in my Safari, in a tab that I never close.
2. Integration with iPhoto, making it possible to simply email a photo from iPhoto, just as you would do with Mail.app. No templates though, so no nice photo emails as you can send from Mail.app.
3. Drag and drop attachments. Just drag and drop any file from your desktop straight into Mailplane as an attachment. Way easier than the web browser method. No support for folders though (would be nice to have it auto-zip folders (especially .app folders).

Mailplane runs on Tiger (no Leopard support yet as I tested yesterday) and even already supports iPhoto ‘08. It currently comes in multiple languages, with a Dutch version being added soon. I took the honor of localizing this app to Dutch, making this my first localization project. I hope it’s not too bad as my Dutch has degraded since my move to the UK.

For now it is free, but there are plans to license the application. I am hoping this price will stay low as I don’t see many people want to pay for something that is normally free. The current version is at 1.51 and is clearly still in Beta, including some bugs and lots of features to be added. That said I expect that Ruben will make future revisions of this app more and more interesting for people who want to use Gmail as a desktop app.

If you want an invite for the Beta, than drop me an email with your details on cbetta[at]gmail.com.

Update: Ruben just announced version 1.51 which comes in 6 more languages, including Dutch.

A week ago I noticed zapreader.com, a site that makes it relatively easy to teach yourself speedreading. At least 1000 people also bookmarked it and from personal experience I can say: It really works quite well. In a nutshell, it takes a bunch of text and splits it into words. It then displays each word (or a block of two, which works a bit better in my opinion) in a huge font in the middle of your screen, for a fraction of a second, before moving on to the next word.

However, the ZAP reader itself has some annoyances so I decided to fix them.

Thus, I present: the (mac only!) desktop app version of zap reader. Download here: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMac.dmg.

It works very simply: select text in any application, then hit CMD+SHIFT+V and ZAPMac automatically starts and zapreads the selected text for you. Once the text is done, it quits automatically. Use Z and X to rewind/fast forward 16 words at a time, and use A and Q to speed up or slow down. space starts and stops, and there are preferences to change a number of things, though the defaults worked the best for me. It intentionally goes fullscreen - to make sure there is no distraction for your eyes.

Apparently it works so well because of two things:

• It saves you from having to ‘track’ - you no longer expend effort to keep your eyes in the right place. Your eyes no longer need to move at all, just keep staring at the same place.
• It makes use of ‘brain replay’. Ever said ‘What did you say?” to someone, only to realize that you DID hear them after all? Your brain has a limited ‘pipeline’ of sorts, but you usually incorrectly think you misheard or misread forcing you to take action. When reading, this means you often reread sentences that you don’t need to reread. With ZAP Reader you force yourself into going forward.

This is my first foray into Mac Os X Cocoa development, incidentally. I spent maybe 12 hours on getting this thing together, including learning a new programming language from scratch (well, enough to write this, anyhow), and including learning how to distribute it, set it up with a nice preference pane that stores its settings in the right places, and all that jazz. Basically cocoa development is really nice and very simple, which may explain why Mac software looks so good.

If you’re interesting in the source, here you go: http://files.fourstarters.com/ZAPMac/ZAPMacSource.zip.

A couple of months ago I did a small review of what I thought would be the really interesting features of Apple Mac OS X Leopard. Not only were all my predictions about the user interface and the growing up of certain features true (yes, drop the balloons!), but Apple also introduced some new features including a new dock and menu and stacks. Obviously I wanted to test this (nearly) feature-full product so I managed to get my hands on the WWDC2007 build and gave it a try.

After an afternoon of playing with Leopard, I was amazed about how well this beta release works. Here and there I encountered some bugs (especially in Photo Booth which has a bunch of new effects that just crash the app) but overall everything was simply quick. Might I say it was maybe even quicker than my Tiger install? Especially the Spotlight search has really been improved to offer more of a feel that Quicksilver does at the moment for Tiger. Furthermore the new look, with harder contrasts between active and inactive windows, is just so much cleaner and with the help of Quick Look and Cover Flow the finder has just become so much more useful.

Finally I was really amazed about how they improved some of my personal Mac Whines. First of all they changed the little network menu item. It now auto-refreshes and shows the difference between open and closed networks. Another network related improvement is the automatic discovery of shares on the network, allowing you to browse open shares much like you would do on Windows. In other words: no need to explicitly mount folders, and no crashing finder when you switch network with a folder mounted.

All an all I think Leopard is worth the money as it offers a lot of improvements over Tiger. I didn’t even mention Time Machine, Spaces and all the other new features, but I think it is those small things that make you a happy Mac user.