Esquire magazine has been doing a wonderful job over the past number of years in providing interesting, engaging and informative journalism aimed at the male populace. In the past few months they have received particular praise from me for their distribution of HD quality videos to showcase photo shoots that appear in the magazine, see my previous post on their recent Kate Beckinsale promo video. As the Summer kicks in a new issue has hit shelves featuring among other things an interview and photo shoot with the absolutely gorgeous Daisy Lowe. Check out the preview video below! Esquire I love you guys : )

Image and video are property of Esquire magazine and are used only in a promotional context.

Task management is something I am continually learning to do better and something which I need to be competent at considering the many demands that populate my days. Although I am now entering what I believe will be the last week of this academic year, I still have a considerable amount to get done by Friday and indeed there are many projects that I intend to spend time on over the Summer months. Up until now I have relied heavily on Things from Cultured Code, an application which I still have immense respect for, to manage my schedule and keep me focused on what I need to do. However having invested in the wonderful book by David Allen – Getting Things Done – and it’s direct use of OmniFocus as a supporting application for the methodology I decided to investigate the application for myself.

I had already spent some time with OmniFocus when first researching the options available for task management. I must admit that my first impressions were not very good, certainly as someone who found Things intuitive, well developed and extremely proficient in it’s task, OmniFocus seemed comparatively complex, lacking the UI polish of it’s counterpart and to further the comparison – like Thing’s Dad. A little dated, perhaps more suited to a maturer audience and a little lacking in the looks department. Age however isn’t everything, as my dear Mum always says the wisdom it brings more than makes up for the shortcomings that accompany it. A more prolonged time with OmniFocus then and I began to see the masterful way in which it had been designed, what first may have revealed itself as complex and lacking actually proved to by superior to it’s younger sibling and certainly better for it’s maturity. OmniFocus is a great application that provides not only a robust interface to support task management but does so in a way which is fully compliant with the Getting Things Done methodology, which for me and many others is a complete game changer.

OmniFocus from the OmniGroup is, as my discussion so far may suggest, a task management application. It allows for the capture, processing, doing & reviewing of all your ongoing activities. OmniFocus is designed to quickly capture your thoughts and allow you to store, manage, and process them into actionable to-do items. As previously mentioned it is 100% compatible with the Getting Things Done® system, but flexible enough for any task management style, OmniFocus helps you work smarter by giving you powerful tools for staying on top of all the things you need to do. Tasks can be captured through manual entry into an inbox or from within other applications via the quick entry process. Once captured tasks must be converted into actionable to-do’s given context and or assigned to projects. This process is cathartic and focuses the mind in and of itself as you mentally process what needs to be done and when. It is great to complete the mind dump process of getting everything into OmniFocus but actually have processed the tasks into actions is even more gratifying.

Once the process of capture is complete OmniFocus is great and keeping you focused on what must be done next, the next actionable step in any project is highlighted and due items made clear. Reminders can be setup to use Growl to flag up on screen when due tasks are approaching and lists can be printed in a very well formatted preset format for paper based task processing. As time moves on and projects evolve reviews can be setup to evaluate how things are going, this can result in new actions being added, additional contexts introduced etc. All serve to aid in the completion of outstanding tasks and promote reflection on the tasks you undertake. OmniFocus has proven itself to be a wonderful, complex and extremely powerful task management application. First impressions can be wrong and sometimes maturity reveals itself slowly – when it does however, sometimes you can be in for a real treat.

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E3 is not far away now so an influx of great new promo materials for upcoming releases is to be expected. One of the first to kick the promo madness into gear is the fantastic new trailer for Deus X Human Evolution. Deus X remains one of my favourite video games of all time – it’s successor while still a decent experience failed to impress, but I am very hopeful that the third release in the franchise will be a return to top form. Decide for yourself by watching the trailer below.

I spend a lot of time with iTunes, it’s my one stop shop for all things music, podcast, audio books, movies and more. More often than not when I’m working on the Mac or indeed kicking back with some WoW or Steam related goodness I have iTunes providing the audio goodness. While there is nothing wrong with the main iTunes interface I have long sought a more discreet and minimalist way of interacting with the application. The idea of a menu bar application to access and control playback was my first idea. Enter CoverSutra a fantastic application from Sophiestication Software.

CoverSutra launches as an application in your dock like most applications but the main interface to the application is to be found in the menu bar as great little music note icon : ) Clicking on this presents a search dialog box which allows for artists, songs, albums etc to be searched with the results displayed for selection. Tracks can be selected individually or an album selected for playback. In this way I can keep working with whatever I am currently doing but quickly and easily navigate through my iTunes library. There are many great little touches, with the change of every track for example CoverSutra displays a little pop up message to let you know the current track. Also you can access a separate control window via the application icon to adjust volume etc.

While by no means necessary CoverSutra does a fantastic job of enhancing the iTunes experience particularly for those that love using iTunes while they do other things. Some of the main features of the application are outlined below:

As an academic I work with a wide range of file types on a daily basis. Perhaps two of the most common are the the MS Word .doc format and the Adobe .pdf – both are very common in academic institutions and both serve very useful and distinct purposes. The .doc file format is perhaps the universal format for information presentation, reports, essays, digital diaries etc are all produced in this format. MS Word, as much as I personally prefer Apple’s Pages, is the standard word processing file format. The .pdf format on the other hand is usually used for distribution of completed documents or documents that generally need not undergo any further editing, assignments, course handbooks, syllabus etc all take this form.

Now occasionally the need arises to work with versions of the files in both formats or more commonly a file currently in .pdf format is desired to be converted to .doc for editing purposes. In some instances this is easy as the master file from which the .pdf was created is available and edits can be made, but sometimes either through misplacement of the master file or indeed receipt of a .pdf from another source an editable version is not easily obtained. Up until now the only real solution was to type out the contents of the .pdf again and insert any tables or diagrams as appropriate. In a short couple of pages document this is a pain but in longer more structured documents it’s actually an impossibility.

Thankfully there is a powerful and intuitive solution from AnyBizSoft – PDF to Word which is now available for the Mac platform.

PDF to Word provides good conversion of .pdf files preserving:

• Batch-Conversion: Allow users to convert up to 50 PDF files at one time. This mode is useful when there are amounts of PDF files need to deal with.
• Partial-Conversion: Allow users to choose the page(s) to convert: Page Range, such as page 1-15 or Specific page(s), such as 5,7,14… This mode is useful when users just want to extract some pages but not the whole PDF.

I have used the application with MS Office 2008 Mac and PDFPen and everything works smoothly. Conversion is fast and files produced highly accurate with exact replicas of source files created. PDF to Word also provides support for encrypted files:

• If the PDF is protected by Owner Password:

PDF to Word for Mac can convert the PDF directly without entering the password.
*Owner Password: Password used to protect PDF files from editing, copying and printing.

• If the PDF is protected by User Password:

To protect the rights of the author or the owner of the PDF file, PDF to Word for Mac requires users to enter the user password to convert.
*User Password: Password used to protect the files from opening, so it is also called open password sometimes.

AnyBizSoft PDF to Word is a fantastic file conversation application for two of the most popular document formats in use today. It is highly recommended for anyone who works between these file types with any degree of regularity. PDF to Word is available via download and retails for $39.95

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I spent some time with Pixelmator over the past couple of days and came up with these : )

No you are reading the title of the post correctly and no it’s not a question but rather a fact. Steam the gaming distribution and social interaction platform has just been launched for the Mac platform. Steam is a gaming hub where users develop a gamer persona, join groups about various games that interest them and download gaming titles. Up until now the application has been exclusive to the PC platform where millions have joined up and enjoyed the fantastic range of services on offer. Steam is a fantastic way to manage your gaming experience, all titles automatically update when patches become available and Steam integrates an achievement tracking system for various titles which has become almost a staple component of video games these days.

While still very much in it’s infancy the application is already reliable and fairly robust. To date I have experience one or two crashes but that was on launch day and the application has updated since release. The games currently available for the Mac platform are very small in number when compared to the PC platform but more have been promised for release on Wednesday of each week over the next couple of months. Furthermore Valve have confirmed that the Mac is now a tier one platform, along with the PC & Xbox360, which means that new Valve developed games will be released simultaneously on each. Multi-award winning titles like Half Life 2 and Team Fortress have been promised and Portal is already available for free up until the 24th May.

The interface is clean and well presented consisting of four main sections, the store, games, news & community. The store is the main hub for purchasing new releases and reflects the contents found on the Steam website. One of the best launch titles to pick up has to be Torchlight – a fantastic action RPG from former Blizzard employees. It oozes quality and is just great fun, certainly the best dungeon crawler this side of Diablo III. The games section is where all the titles you have purchased can be found, details about achievements obtained, friends progress and details about the game itself can all be found here. The news tab, as the name suggests, provides an insight into updates, upcoming releases, promotions and events. Finally the community tab is the social side of Steam where you can manage friends, develop your profile and find out what others are doing over chat.

Steam is a fantastic application and one that is very much welcomed on the Mac platform. While it will never rival the PC as a gaming device and I don’t consider that a bad thing, this is definitely a step in raising awareness of the Mac as a viable gaming outlet and one which Mac owners will surely welcome.

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I have long been a fan & user of Adobe’s Photoshop application. Over the past number of years, probably back as far as version seven, I have used the digital image editing application to support my teaching and in the development of all graphic related content. Lately however I have grown somewhat annoyed at the developer in how it ties users down to it’s applications and the ridiculous price it charges for the various applications. With relationships between Adobe and my platform of choice, Mac, strained to say the least it was time to explore viable alternatives.

Having conducted some research into possible software solutions I discovered Pixelmator, appropriately tagged “Image Editing For The Rest Of Us”. Pixelmator is a layer-based image editor. You can quickly create layers from your photos, other pictures, from selections or even your iSight. Yes, Pixelmator can add a layer to your composition directly from your Mac’s little camera. Not only can you link and arrange added layers, but Pixelmator allows you to blend layers, change their opacity, create clipping masks or even add layer masks to hide some portions of layer. With Pixelmator’s powerful, pixel-accurate collection of selection tools you can quickly and easily select any part of your images. That means you can edit and apply special effects to portions of your pictures, remove unwanted objects or even cut out objects from one picture to put on another. Thanks to the masks palette in Pixelmator, you can even save your selections for later. Already you should be starting to realise that not only is Pixelmator a very powerful image editing application but that it offers many features that so called industry standard applications charge significantly more for.

The current version 1.5 Spider offers a robust suite of tools to allow for many image editing needs. Pixelmator features a simple and elegant collection of intuitive color correction tools. Using these tools you can fine-tune hue, saturation, and luminance; adjust exposure, color levels, brightness and contrast; use Auto Enhance to dramatically improve less-than-perfect images with one click; even use Curves, Color Balance, Channel Mixer and much more. Pixelmator is the real filter-machine. It has over 130 filters and special effects for your needs. Just choose any of nicely designed distortion, blur sharpen, color, stylize, halftone, tile generator, transition and Quartz Composer filters and boom – you see the result in real-time. Pixelmator not only comes with handy and powerful selection, painting and retouching tools, but it also has everything you need for typing text on your pictures, analysing colors, cropping, transforming, moving anything in your pictures or navigating through your images. With Pixelmator’s easy-to-use but powerful tools you can do a lot more with your images than you ever could before.

Pixelmator supports over 100 different file formats. You can open and save in PSD, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, PDF, EPS and scores of other image formats. Above all, Pixelmator can open and save Photoshop files with layers. Pixelmator is based on Core Image technology that uses your Mac’s video card for image processing. Core Image utilizes the graphics card for image processing operations, freeing the CPU for other tasks. And if you have a high-performance card with increased video memory (VRAM), you’ll find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of Pixelmator operations. Pixelmator is blistering-fast on the latest PowerPC and all Intel-based Mac’s. What if you just love having fun with filters, but think that Pixelmator doesn’t have enough of them? Well, think again—Pixelmator significantly outshines other applications with its powerful plug-in architecture that takes advantage not only of Core Image units, but also of Quartz Composer compositions. This means you can simply download or create your own Core Image unit or even Quartz Composer composition and play with it right away in Pixelmator.

There is a great community that have bought and love the application and a host of learning materials available all across the Internet from YouTube to the Pixelmator podcast For $59 you get a professional and feature rich image editing application where really you will only be limited by your imagination.

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The wonderful people at Pixelmator have been kind enough to sponsor a competition through the blog. I have one Pixelmator serial key to give away. To win just respond to this post stating how you would use Pixelmator in your daily work flow. The winner will be chosen at random and announced in the near future. Good Luck!

Competition now closed – more competition news soon!

Over the past decade I have seen many changes to the environment of learning, some for the better some in my personal opinion for the worse. At the very least it’s great that the process of learning is evolving and people are prepared to explore new methodologies to support it. The introduction of web 2.0 concepts has given rise to a myriad of new tools and technologies to enhance the learning process, these tools do not change the process of learning but rather serve to allow learning to take place in more engaging and relevant ways. Boundaries of geographical placement, time and personal approach have been broken by the introduction of podcasts, VLE’s, e-portfolios, collaboration and in my opinion most effectively by screencasts. Screencasts, for those unaware, are videos created by recording the on screen activity of a given computer – software demonstrations, feedback, office hours, summaries etc can all be created like never before.

While the process of recording a screencast is fairly intuitive it does present the need for knowledge of many nuances relevant to the concept, software to use, suitable preparation, encoding settings, distribution, editing techniques. There really are a lot of things that a sound working knowledge of are needed to become efficient at designing recording and producing high quality screencasts. A few months back I reviewed a book then currently still in development relating to the process of screencast development, The Screencasting Handbook, which even then definitive in it’s description and addressing of the development of screencasts. The great news is that the book is now complete and has just been released!

The Screencasting Handbook weighs in at just under 130 pages and takes those completely new to screencasting as well as those that have some knowledge of the area through the processes and concepts involved in professional screencast production. The book deals primarily with techniques and approaches so users of no one application will feel isolated or left out. That said there are specific sections that relate content back to some of the leading screencasting applications Telestream’s ScreenFlow 2 & Camtasia Studio. As a ScreenFlow user myself I found the content relevant, useful and informative at all times and learned a few things that I wasn’t already aware of. The book opens with a general exploration of the concept, outlining where it can be used and how. From there the next couple of chapters deal with producing screencasts of varying complexity over different periods of time. The chapter on how to make a screencast in 30 mins for example providing a quick basic intro to what needs to be done while the later chapter on doing the same over a number of days details some of the more complex and time consuming factors involved in professional screencast production. It should become clear from these that screencasting while quick and effective should the need arise can also be a time consuming and complex process but one which presents many rewards when done right.

The book proceeds to deal with the export and distribution process often considered to be some of the most difficult due to the wide range of options available. Quite often screencasters will want to distribute their productions to a wide audience in a variety of formats for a range of devices. HD formats may be required for TV or computer playback, iPod specific versions, Flash encoded files for websites etc. The book does an excellent job of explaining the codecs available and how these may be tweaked to cater for different needs of quality and device specifics. Later chapters deal with resources relevant to screencasters, exploring microphones and equipment to be used to support the development process and specfic software solutions are examined in more detail.

Throughout the book is clear, concise and very well presented, Diagrams are used to good effect and instruction is clear at all times. Even those with an already good working knowledge of the process will pick up new tricks and tips worthy of the price of investment, at present $36. Anyone who works in education, demonstration, staff development, communication, software support or anywhere that enhanced communication would benefit what you do needs to check this publication out. It’s a sound investment in what I consider a detailed and well written exploration of a new media format that will grow more and more relevant as we evolve further into the age of collaboration. I wish to thank Ian Ozsvald personally for his investment of time and energy in the writing of the book and I’m sure many others will share my admiration. Check out The Screencasting Handbook now!

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Splinter Cell Conviction is the latest release in the Splinter Cell series and is available on Xbox360. You play the role of Sam Fisher a spy and weapons & special tactics master out for revenge for those that may have been involved in the death of his daughter. The game mechanics rely heavily on the stealth approach of the series but some nice new additions have been added such as new take down moves, execution mode and a tracer to show Sam’s last known position if he gets spotted. In addition to the single player campaign the game also features fantastic co-op play and multiplayer modes. The game has been getting very good reviews in the gaming press and now you have a chance to win a copy for yourself.

All you have to do is follow me on Twitter, retweet the competition info found here and answer the following simple question as a reply post on the blog.

What is the name of Sam’s daughter?

Competition Rules

• Entrants must be 15 or over to enter and have their parents or guardian’s permission to take part if under the age of 18.
• The competition will run for three weeks with all entries received before 11.00pm Sunday 23rd May UK time valid.
• The competition is only available to UK blog readers or those with a UK address.
• Only one entry per person based on a per email basis – please make sure to provide a valid email address as this will be used to contact you should you be the winner.
• The winner will be announced on Monday 24th May with the winner chosen at random by myself.
• The winner must have fulfilled all of the competition requirements, follow me on Twitter, retweeted the competition link, answered the question correctly, and meet entry legal requirements.
• My decision is final & I take no responsibility for loss of packages during postage – I will use Royal Mail recorded delivery.
• This competition holds no association with Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction the video game and I except no responsibility for the quality of the product
• Rules are subject to change

Competition closed – winner will be contacted directly. Thanks to all for taking part.

Backing up is something most computer literate people will be aware of, yet it is something that is often neglected my millions of computer users in varying disciplines all over the world. I myself fall into this category to some degree, I do have Time Machine backups and a good part of  my data stored on external hard drives but I do not manage the process with any degree of regularity or indeed care. Listening to a few of my favourite podcasts The Mac Attack, Mac Power Users and generally realising the need for a strategic backup plan I have started to take steps to ensure that my attitude towards the process changes and that I take a more proactive role in making sure my backup policy is properly implemented. To begin with today I directly copied some of my most important folders on to my main data external hard drive. Already I feel a little less worried knowing that I have a copy of working data on another location : )

The next step was to run Time Machine, Apples Leopard and above integrated backup application. I love the Time Machine interface and the whole concept of time travel coinciding with the process of backing up is sheer geekgasm. Time Machine works by essentially taking snap shots of the system as it stands, files folders etc as the exist at present are recorded and indexed by date. A wonderful Apple interface allows you to “go back and forward in time” to retrieve and restore files as needed. It all works wonderfully well and as I write this the process is running on my system : ) Time Machine required an external hard drive formatted as HFS+ Journal and I suggest getting a drive with as much space as possible. Once full Time Machine will start replacing older backups with newer ones informing you of such before it happens. It is an extremely useful way of maintaining a record of your files as they are at present.

In addition to having an incremental system snapshot facility with Time Machine it is also highly advised to have a complete clone of a given hard drive. A clone of a system drive not only means that you have a working copy of all your data files but that all of the applications and system settings will be maintained. To implement my drive clones I use Carbon Copy Cloner which is available for free for personal & educational use. CCC offers many advanced and useful features but the basic premise of offering a bootable clone of your main system drive is the key feature available. CCC provides functionality for block level copying of data which means that not all of a given file need be backed up once changed, only the blocks effected. This has greater significance with larger files but makes the whole backup process quicker. The initial backup or cloning of a drive can take some time but incremental changes thereafter are relatively quick. Carbon Copy Cloner is fantastic application offering an intuitive and clean user interface, it provides backup functionality for just about every need and is free for personal use. Customer testimonials suggest that it is very reliable and a provides for hassle free backups and indeed restores when the need arises.

The final component of my backup strategy is Mozy. Any competent backup process will involve the backing up of data to off site locations – I had already signed up with Mozy and their US backup facilities but recently Mozy offered backup for UK and Ireland residents to local European servers. The main reason for this was to comply with European backup law but it also means that people based in the UK like myself have a faster backup procedure available to them. Mozy is widely considered one of the best backup solutions on the Mac platform, a recent study by MacFormat magazine identified Mozy as the most Mac like backup application and I have to agree. Mozy offers 2GB of backup storage for free, you simply need to sign up for an account and paid solutions start at £4.99 a month for unlimited backup of one computer. All user data is encrypted locally with military-grade encryption prior to transfer via 128-bit SSL connection. Users can choose a managed encryption key or choose a personal key for added security. Data is stored in state-of-the-art data centers that employ the highest security standards and are SAS70 or ISO certified. MozyHome the version for personal use and the one which I am using installs as an application and provides access to backup configuration through a menu bar item. All that is required is to select what is to be backed up, when, using how much bandwidth and you are good to go. Backups can be scheduled to take place during the night for example, with initial backups taking days or weeks depending on how much data needs to be seeded.

The development of a more robust backup plan has left me feeling a lot less worried about my critical data, I strongly urge everyone to explore the options available for themselves and take the necessary steps to implement a plan that suits you. Whatever you go with I guarantee you will feel better about it.

Christina Aguilera knows how to make a statement, she also knows how to look insanely hot and sing a great pop song. After a long break she’s back doing both. Check out some preview pics and the new video below.