I found it very ironic that you could not watch the WWDC Keynote, primarily focused on the iPhone, on your iPhone. Unless of course you downloaded it to your Mac through the Apple Store as a podcast and then synced it to your iPhone, albeit for better viewing, but they should have let it stream to your phone right from the website.

I’ve been trying to download the WWDC Keynote all morning with no luck.

Common Apple!!!!!

Needless to say I hope to be one of the first to have a 3G iPhone.

If you have yet to watch the WWDC Keynote you can find it right here.

They call it Photoshop Express, they should call it Photoshop Air. This is a perfect companion for anyone using a MacBook Air, and even more for students. It doesn’t get anymore lightweight than software that isn’t really on your computer. Photoshop Express is Adobe’s ONLINE WEB BASED VERSION of Adobe Photoshop. You can login to your PS Express account from any computer that is running a modern browser with Flash 9 installed. It took me about a minute to signup, another minute to upload ten photos, another few minutes to through a filter on them, and another minute to share them. 10 Minutes and there you have it, one of the finest online photo editing suites available.

The graphical, Adobe Air-based user interface is both accessible and attractive. Building a basic slideshow is a snap, and sharing the slideshow is just as simple.

Here is an image that quickly used Auto Correct on, you can see the difference in the two photos taken at the same time, PS Express took about 5 seconds to complete the filter, it also saves your original so you can revert back at anytime, similar to iPhoto. When a filter is applied it shows a checkbox next to it so you can toggle that filter on and off.

Once an image is uploaded to your account you can simply double click it to apply one of 17 common filters including; Crop & Rotate, Auto Correct, Exposure, Red-Eye Removal, Touchup, Saturation, White Balance, Highlight, Fill Light, Sharpen, Soft Focus, Pop Color, Hue, Black & White, Tint, Sketch and Distort. These are the most common filters used by photographers in Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Adobe also made it easy for you to share your photos with other Social Networking Websites like Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa. I hope .Mac will be in a future version, unless Apple adds these only features to what they might call ePhoto or iPhoto Online.

Photoshop Express: Early Verdict
Photoshop Express is a simple and very easy-to-use online photo-editing tool. My favorite thing about it is the 2GB of storage space and easy upload methods, not to mention you can also upload to Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa

Its editing tools are somewhat basic, but that really could be enough for most users. However, in comparison to a fully baked online editing suite like Picnik, Photoshop Express just doesn’t have all the bells and whistles I enjoy. Adobe will, of course, be rolling out more tools over the next few months as the software is currently in an early public beta.

As you might expect, Adobe has big plans for the currently free Photoshop Express, which includes rolling out paid premium services and making it a platform to integrate with desktop products like Lightroom and Elements.

Final Comment: PS Express is pretty polished for a Beta Version, I look forward to seeing the final release when it comes out.

Check Photoshop Express and let us know what your thoughts are.

Stay tuned for our full review of Picnik. I never knew Picnik existed until I started reviewing Photoshop Express.

When OS X 10.5 (Leopard) changed the way that folders are represented in the Dock, I lost a handy start menu made by dragging the Applications folder to the end of the dock.

This is a small Cocoa application that creates a hierarchical menu, in the dock, and when it is the frontmost app, in the menu bar, of your apps. It only shows apps. If a folder has a single app, it hoists the app up, so no subfolders of exactly one app.

After adding AppMenuBoy to your dock it takes a few seconds for it to fully launch, it needs to go through every folder in your Applications Folder and find each app to add to its file structure. Once loaded it works pretty sweet and it uses less resources that expected. By checking your Activity Monitor located in your Utilities Folder you can see that AppMenuBoy uses zero CPU usage, and a modest amount of virtual memory, 776MB on my machine with about 100 applications loaded on it. This is a great app for power users that switch and load programs frequently, like me.

AppMenuBoy is also open source. Excellent!!!!

Thank you David Oster for writing this great little app.

Get it here FREE at the Google Developer Center

MacAttapp REVIEW:
If you’re looking for a low-cost alternative to expensive Web design suites like Dreamweaver and GoLive, Coda is a good alternative. This one-window Web design app has all the tools you need for creating great Web sites, except for WYSISYG. Coda’s tools let you seamlessly work together with others, and includes and easy to setup and use FTP sidebar– using the power of Panic’s Transmit–helps you get your site updated quickly via HTML coding. Hand coding experts will like the full-featured CSS and text editors, with tools that are always only a click away. Time savers like the Clips feature make frequently used code handy and convenient, but not for the novice, these features can be overwhelming.

So in case you haven’t already guessed, from within Coda you can use FTP, terminal, preview, a CSS editor, and of course live edit your remote files on the fly. When I first launched Coda it was easy to grab a site via FTP or load one from a local directory.

The real nuts and bolts of an app like this is its live editing feature. Some of the other work-flow apps I’ve used really don’t handle the remote editing of files that elegantly. Working live on sites that are on servers states or countries away is a snap with Coda, live FTP enables you to do quick edits to a site quickly.

Which brings us to the built in code editor. All of the usual languages are supported and styled appropriately including: CSS, HTML, Javascript, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, XML, and straight text. Again, I’m leaning towards recommending Coda for advanced users looking for more control of sites over those provided by Dreamweaver or even others that I’ve reviewed.

Coda also comes packed with a CSS editing tool, a VERY Cool one at that. I’m by no means a hard coder and found this CSS editor far superior than anything I’ve worked with in the past, blew away the included CSS editor in Dreamweaver. If you are a novice with CSS, Coda might just be your best friend. Stashed off in one of the tabs is a books section which was outfitted with the PHP manual and 3 others. I didn’t see an option to add your own books, or how this could even be done, but having all of my dev literature in one place is a pretty remarkable concept.

We’ll see how it goes, but after a few hours working with Coda I’m already a fan of many aspects, the included Terminal is very useful to those hard, hard coders, and the nicely designed code editor are the best features. It’s almost guaranteed to be a huge hit with other OS X developers. Be sure to check out Panic’s site to get your own copy. The copy I have expires in 14 days (up on Monday), and we’ll have to wait and see if I really shell out the $79.

Bottom Line:
Coda is really short for Coder, Coda is for Coders and those that want a powerful and easy to use CSS editor. I would recommend Coda an addon to your web development arsenal, but not a the lead program.

Get it:
You can grab a 14 day trial here or jump right into a license for $79.00. From the looks of their buy page that price may go up to $99 in the near future.

For now, of the three reviews of Mac Web Development Tools under $100 my vote goes to RapidWeaver 3.6.6. (Click here for the full RapidWeaver review by MacAttap)

NEXT ON MacAttapp.com: Several reviews are coming of smaller apps, many Freeware, so stay tuned the best Mac Software Review Site in the World!

Don’t forget to sign up for our updates!

Nvu (pronounced N-view)

From the Nvu Website:

Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Macintosh, Windows and Linux desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. (Well that’s what Nvu says anyhow). Nvu (which stands for “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

Nvu is 100% open source and released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Anyone is welcome to download Nvu at no charge, including the source code if you need to make special changes. Developers are encouraged to get involved and help make Nvu even better.

I’ve always been a big supporter of open-source, especially since we run all Linux web servers here at Maine Hosting Solutions.

Review:

Nvu is an easy-to-use free WYSIWYG web editor with many features that allow you to create and maintain a fully functional website, complete with forms. Great for a simple editor, but not nearly as powerful as RapidWeaver, but what do you expect for FREE. I guess what I should really be saying is if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Nvu is limited, but if you’re looking to do simple edits to an existing website it can be an easy workaround. With limitations right off the bat I limited my review a bit, not many of you are too interested in a web dev app that isn’t full featured.

The moment you go beyond the basics, or move beyond table-based layout to follow current web site development practices Nvu’s weaknesses start showing. Any current ‘How-to book’ will guide a web-site developer towards using CSS and DIV tag controls. Once you start moving beyond the basics site management, HEAD tag editing, and HTML editing become increasingly important. In all these areas Nvu struggles, significantly limiting its appeal. Still FREE though, gotta give it that.

One thing I really found lacking was the site manager, Dreamweaver and GoLive set the stage for site managers and most modern web editing apps out there have some form of one, not Nvu. You keep all your files online, or open them one by one in the editor from a folder on your drive. This makes it difficult to do relative linking, but not impossible.

All in all Nvu wrote pretty clean code, functioned well (no bugs or crashes noticed on an Intel based iMac running Leopard), was simple to install and did what they say it does, edits webpages. Downside is that’s where it ended, don’t think your going to do some killer designs with this package.

Recommendation

Perfect for users who have had their site designed by a professional and need access to their files online to make simple edits to text and photos. Great replacement for anyone using FrontPage that doesn’t want to spend ANY money to keep editing their site, with some frustrations, as they are already used to. This review series of web editors under $100 will show better aps than Nvu, but for FREE this is the best FREE app I’ve seen, and it runs on OSX, Win and Linux.

You can download Nvu at no charge!

NEXT: Coda 1.1, this thing looks really promising. Stay Tuned!

We’re destined to flush out the best web creation software that is not only affordable, but easy to install (Aren’t they all on a Mac?), easy to use, and most importantly easy to publish to your web space. Our First review is of Realmac’s RapidWeaver, appropriate for our First review since they just released an important update V3.6.6:

Realmac Software today announced an update to RapidWeaver, its award-winning website creation application for Mac OS X. RapidWeaver 3.6.6 sees numerous improvements to the application including a significantly enhanced exporting process, along with a number of other minor fixes designed to improve the handling of QuickTime movies and images.

After playing with RapidWeaver for about an hour I was able to easily create and upload a simple brochure style website. The built in templates are an ease to install and it appears that there are more that are in development all the time that cater to all types of business and organizations. There are even iPhone Themes for to target iPhone users, now that’s a well thought feature considering the now over 4 Million iPhones in use worldwide. Themes are easy to edit via RapidWeaver’s simple to use CSS editor.

Personally I’m a big fan of WordPress (the Online Blog Software that MacAttapp is created on), but if you’re looking for an offline blog client RapidWeaver gave me a good feel. The only drawback was the lack of customizable tools, themes and plugins that are available for the online blog clients like Blogger and WordPress.

The most powerful feature I found in RapidWeaver was the ability to create Photo Galleries. Photographers and Artists should take close notice of this enhanced feature in V3.6.6. You can easily select a directory of photos and create an online Photo Gallery of just about any type of image, gif, jpeg, pdf, png.. Different layouts and features were also available to further customize the gallery.

With the growth of enhanced media on the net it is essential for a modern website creation tool to easily handle these types of media. RapidWeaver had the ability to handle video and flash files with the proper code and enhanced handling.

Last, but not least, uploading was a breeze via my .Mac account and seemed just as simple to publish via FTP or SFTP for those who who need that high security feature.

All in all RapidWeaver V3.6.6 is a thumbs up by MacAttapp and is recommended for beginners and advanced users. This app could even give users of Dreamweaver a run for their money. The full version can be had for just $49.00, now that’s a bargain for all these features.

ScreenCasts Online has also created these RapidWeaver Video Tutorials on how to use RapidWeaver.

Check out RealMacs Software’s RapidWeaver V3.6.6 and take if for a FREE download and test drive.

Stay tuned for our next MacAttapp Review: NVU

This is a description of Rage Domainer from RAGE’s website:

Manage your domains with RAGE Domainer. RAGE Domainer lets you keep track of the domains you own, and the domains you want to own letting you know when they expire and which ones provide the best bang for your buck.

With RAGE Domainer you can quickly analyze the value of domains by getting quick access to a website’s Google PageRank, AlexaRank, Incoming Links and Delicious Tags. All packaged together in the most beautiful Mac OS X interface you have ever seen in a website management tool!

And now for the review:

Domainer is the essential tool for users who regularly buy and sell domains, own and maintain multiple websites or want to keep track of their competitor’s online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) strategies.

RAGE Domainer can be a useful tool to manage your domain names and monitor ones you wish to buy. The application, presented in a clear and attractive interface, allows you to quickly view all essential informations on domain names such as creation date, expiration date and hosting details. Information precious to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) like Google PageRank, AlexaRank or Incoming Links is presented in different colored boxes, to make it easily accessible.

RAGE Domainer simplifies your work, as it can automatically import the information you want on any domain name. You can also create smart groups to better filter and organize your different domain names, creating any type of folder like top movers, expiring or top performing sites. RAGE Domainer also lets you know when a domain name is added to a social network like del.icio.us.

RAGE Domainer is an excellent desktop solution to manage and monitor domain names.

Get RAGE Domainer Here