If you are looking for a relatively inexpensive holiday gift for a photographer who uses Adobe Lightroom, LrSaver might be it. It’s a simple program which does one thing – create a screensaver based on your Lightroom catalog.
There are two features I like about LrSaver:
- You can use smart collections, which are based on any combination of metadata, to pick the images for your screensaver.
- LrSaver utilizes your Lightroom cache, not your actual images, for the screen saver. If you have your images on an external drive, you can still use LrSaver even if that drive is not connected.
Availability for Windows and Mac
Price: $9.99 at LrSaver.com
The MacHeist bundle has often been controversial and the free MacHeist nano bundle (5+1 apps for free for 4 more days) isn’t different, either. Upset by the nano-bundle, a coalition of Mac developers, organized by Daniel Jerkut, the developer of MarsEdit, now offers its own discounts: While the MacHeist nano bundle is alive, they offer the “One Finger Discount” (no, they do not specify which finger) – 20% off of all software from all participating Mac developers.
Simply go to OneFingerDiscount.com to see a list of participating developers – so far, 75 and growing. All of them have links to their stores, where you can enter the coupon code “One Finger Discount” to get 20%. So check them out and if you need to stock up on Mac software, this is your opportunity.
Among the participating developers are Red Sweater Software, Smile on my Mac and Tiny Planet Software.
After the Macfriendly bundle was released (and did not really sell well), MacHeist is next. This time with a free bundle of 5+1 apps. Since it’s free, there is no reason for you to not get it, so grab it now.
My quick take on the bundle:
- If you are a Twitterer, getting Twitterific for free alone warrants your trip to the MacHeist site.
- If you get distracted by all your windows on your Mac while writing your latest novel, give WriteRoom a try – it takes over your entire screen, thus allowing you to really focus on your writings.
- TinyGrab is a screen capturing utility with a twist – you can upload your screenshots straight to your own FTP server and use the provided URLs to tell people where to find them. I will probably not use it, since I have enough screen grabbing software already.
- If you are in need of organizing all the tiny bits of info, ShoveBox is a great app for that. I would use it, but I already use YoJimbo for exactly that purpose.
- Hordes of Orcs is a good take on tower defense games.
- Still locked, the most desirable app is MarinerWrite, a full fledged text editor. This one I will definitely install, should it get unlocked.
The value of this bundle cannot be beat, so head on over to MacHeist and download it now.
Sunrise Sunset is an iPhone app that allows you to track sunrise and sunset right from your iPhone.
The app comes in three flavors:
The Sunrise Sunset LITE version allows you to track sunrise and sunset for your current location. While it is free, that is simply too limiting for me.
The regular Sunrise Sunset app adds access to a huge location database as well as keeping track of dawn, solar noon and dusk. Much better.
The PRO version also lets you track the sun position throughout the day as well as inclination and azimuth.
As a photographer, knowing dawn, sunrise, sunset and dusk is important, so their regular app is probably your first choice. However, there are other apps such as PhotoCalc (see our review) that include that kind of functionality, so you might want to check your iPhone before purchasing it. And if you need the whole enchilada, go for the PRO version. It does not seem as detailed as the Helios Sun Position Calculator, but then it’s also much more affordable.
Supported languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean
Price:
Sunrise Sunset Lite: Free,
Sunrise Sunset: $0.99,
Sunrise Sunset Pro: $1.99
