Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

What's Adobe Lightroom? Well it's Adobe's version of Aperature... which is like iPhoto and Photoshop all rolled into one clean program.

Adove lightroom logo

In short, it's a gorgeous application that lets you organize and edit your photos, create awesome slideshows, prints, or webpages to show off your photos. This video will show you what Lightroom is and the quality of photos you can make and edit.

Adobe Lightroom

Click here for some cool video tips on how to get started and use some of the more advanced features.

VMware Fusion

If you own an Intel powered Mac you probably know about Boot camp and Parallels, but VMware Fusion is in a whole new league of awesomeness! This is what you see when you first open Fusion.

VMware Fusion

Oh, you see a few distros of Linux up there you say? Yeah, Fusion can handle any OS you throw at it... 32 or 64 bit! That includes any distribution of Linux, Windows 3.1 to Vista plus server editions, Solaris, Novell NetWare, Free BSD, and pretty much any other OS that can run on an Intel processor.

VMware Unity

With VMware Fusion you can enable Unity, which lets you run Windows apps right on your Mac desktop right along side your Mac apps. You can then minimize them to the dock, use them with Spaces and Exposé. You can actually save programs to your dock just like normal Mac apps and when yo want to open them you just click on it like a regular application and it opens on your desktop just like normal. Above you can see my desktop running the Windows version of Firefox and Minesweeper right alongside with Apple Mail, Adium, and iTunes.

You should really check it out, there's a free demo on the
VMware site, and I found my copy for $39 on Amazon.

Sofa Control

sofacontrol logo Sofa Control ($14.90) (or use the key in iSerial) lets you control everything on your mac with your Apple remote. Keynote, Preview, iPhoto, VLC, Quicktime, DVD Player, Finder, Mail, you can even control the mouse with your remote! Plus over 60 more applications. When you start it up for the first time Sofa Control shows you how you can use it with a very interactive presentation using your remote right off the bat.

Picture 1

This app is really awesome and the only thing I wish they would add is support for more applications.

sofacontrol_global

Above is what this what you see overlaying the desktop when you hold the menu button for 2 seconds. You get a global menu that gives you access to a whole bunch of the Finder native options. (i.e. dashboard, exposé, front row, screensaver, sleep timer, shut down, restart, also you can open any application or file).

MenuCalendarClock

I have always wanted for Apple to implement a feature to the menubar that almost every Linux distribution has had for years, a calendar when you click on the time, not just the date. Well this awesome little app does one better, it lets you view and add new events to your iCal calendars! Plus, do you use the to do's in Mail or iCal? They are now integrated right into this clock replacement app. Give it a look, it's awesome, doesn't use hardly any system resources, after all it is just a clock most of the time.

menuCalendarClock screen shot

As you can see the clock at the top right with the iCal logo is MenuCalendarClock. You can set a key to automatically make the calendar come out and in if you like, or just click on it. If you click on the list icon at the bottom your to do's will come up and you can check them off as you complete them. When you hover over a date scheduled in your calendar (colored blue) a small text tip bubble comes up to tell you what's scheduled, if you double click on a date it will open iCal to that date!