BravoBug News

MiLife is meant to be simple and easy-to-use, but it has many powerful features. Here are some quick tips and tricks:

• Built-in dictionary: MiLife is a full-fledged Cocoa application, and supports OS X’s built-in dictionary. Try moving your mouse cursor over a word, then hold down the Command, Control, and ‘D‘ keys for a moment to see a dictionary definition of the word.
• Under 10.5, your diary pages can include not only styled text and images, but audio clips and video clips as well. Try dragging an audio file or movie into the MiLife writing area (careful, those files can be big sometimes!)
• Did you know MiLife supports OS X’s spelling checker? You can turn it on under the ‘Spelling’ submenu in the ‘Edit’ menu.
• You can organize and mark important pages with MiLife 1.1’s bookmarks feature. Press Command-Shift-B to bookmark a page. To see a list of your diary’s bookmarks, take a look at the Bookmarks submenu in the Diary menu. Select any bookmark to flip to that page instantly.
• You never need to save your pages, MiLife will do it automatically, any time you flip to a new page or close your diary. If you want to be sure your page is saved, though, you can always save the current page by choosing ‘Save Now’ from the File menu.
• MiLife’s fullscreen backdrop will automatically toggle itself off and on. Try pressing Command-Shift-M to show the backdrop, then press Command-Tab to switch to a different application. MiLife will hide the backdrop until you come back to write again.
• You can insert website links or make them yourself. Try typing http://google.com (or any other web address), highlight the address text, and right-click (or control-click) to bring up the contextual menu. From there, choose ‘Make Link’. Your address is now a clickable website link, right inside your page.
• You can use keyboard shortcuts for many of MiLife features. Try pressing Command-Shift-F to search all the pages of your Diary. While in the Search window, you can press Command-N to start a new search. (And to search just the current page, press Command-F).
• You can click ‘Diary Settings’ in the drawer or choose ‘Diary Settings’ from the Diary menu to change the options for your diary, such as the page and writing sound effects, default font, and password settings.
• You can change the way the MiLife intro window looks, just click ‘Preferences’ on the main window and choose a new theme.
• Want to hide/show your diary Drawer window? Just press Command-\, or click the small disclosure triangle in the top left of the diary window.
• MiLife can export and import in Rich Text format, Word Doc format, and HTML format. Want to backup all your pages? You can archive your diary into a single output file by choosing ‘Export Diary’ from the File menu.

Is there a feature you’d like to see the next release of MiLife? Please let us know. Have fun writing!

- Added new Bookmarks feature
- Added full-journal diary export
- Added text import ability
- Added password & encryption options for existing diaries
- Improved diary-wide search speed
- Added live version checking
- Added option to disable all sound effects
- Added new Window Themes option
- Export Page RTFD now properly saves embedded images
- Under 10.5, pages can now properly include video and audio
- Added HTML and Word Doc formats for exporting
- Improved printing functionality
- Improved application error-checking
- Improved memory efficiency for page loading
- Several Bug Fixes

Click here to download the new, full 1.1 version!

The upcoming release of MiLife 1.1 promises to be a solid upgrade with several brand new features and improved reliability.

Printing support has been enhanced, error-checking has been improved, more options are available for MiLife’s sound effects and appearance, plus we are working diligently on adding bookmarking, direct text import, and a full journal export option for compiling all your diary/journal pages into a single output file for archiving or importing into another Word Processor. In addition, the single-page export option now properly saves all embedded images, audio clips, and videos.

As mentioned in the previous post, this upgrade should be out before the end of the month and will be 100% free for registered users. Stay tuned and thank you again for visiting.

I thought I would take this opportunity today to list some of my favorite freeware and open source tools for Mac OS X. I really have no clue how I could live without some of these, and the fact that they have been released to the Mac community for free makes them all the more wonderful. They are also a testament to the generosity and all-around awesomeness of the Mac and Open-Source developer communities.

NeoOffice – NeoOffice is essentially Microsoft Office for OS X, for free. It provides all the tools you need to make, edit, and save Office-compatible Word docs, spreadsheets, and more.

Smultron – One of my favorite open source GUI text editors, and it’s 100% free

NewsFire – A beautiful, easy-to-use RSS feed reader for OS X. It has a few quirks but with a $0 pricetag there can’t be any complaining.

Audacity – A completely free and surprisingly powerful audio editor. (I’d also like to add a quick plug for Amadeus II which, although not freeware, is a very awesome program.)

CybderDuck – An awesome, free FTP client for OS X. Makes uploading and transferring files incredibly simple. Great interface with a Mac-like feel.

QuickSilver – A very powerful, incredibly useful tool that will almost certainly increase your productivity. A properly-configured installation of QuickSilver is like adding nitro to your workflow. You’ll wonder how you worked without it. I should mention briefly that from my experience QuickSilver can be buggy at times (it is still in beta, and crashes every now and then for me), and it also has kind of a steep learning curve when you first start setting up all its features. But its power more than makes up for all these minor shortcomings. If you start using QuickSilver just do a few quick Google searches for tutorials as they are all over the net.

HexFiend – An incredibly easy to use but powerful Hex editor. View the raw contents of any file, no matter how large, and modify or patch it with ease.

VLC Media Player – An incredibly robust and powerful media player that does just about everything you can think of, from playing all sorts of video files, to playing DVDs, to working with live streams, or media conversion. I’m expecting a built-in coffeemaker in the next version.

FireFox – (Sorry, I had to list it.) I know everyone under the Sun either already has or has tried FireFox by now, but this list wouldn’t feel complete without it. (And, if you by chance have not tried out this browser, please give it a try.)

Colloquy – Free IRC chat room client for OS X. Easy to use, great features, and an even greater price tag.

GIMP – Free open-source image editor, a good alternative to Photoshop for those who may not be able to afford it.

Wings3D & Blender – Open source 3D modeling tools. Since I don’t do much work with 3D models personally I haven’t worked with these although from what I hear they are definitely worth a download!

These apps are all incredibly useful pieces of software, and they are all free! Be sure to check them out, and support the authors however you can.

PS: If you know of any worthwhile open source or freeware OS X tools that should be added to this list please let me know.

Just in case you might have missed it, here’s the portion of the Apple keynote discussing the new iPhone 3G.

An interesting side-story that has developed around the keynote was Steve Jobs’ appearance. Many bloggers and journalists have commented on how emaciated he looked. I myself didn’t notice until I started reading all of the various articles. Jobs’ health has been a concern of many after he was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer in 2003. Apple, however, released a statement reassuring fans that Steve has simply been a bit under the weather from a recent bug going around.

New information released on OS X 10.6 indicates that it will, in fact, drop support for PPC processors, which means all G5 Macs are facing a very rapid extinction. I personally am very disappointed by this as I feel like my G5 iMac is not nearly old enough to already be considered obsolete by Apple. A large number of consumers and businesses alike made very hefty investments in Apple’s G5 Macintoshes when Apple was speaking of the processors as though they were the future of Apple. It will be interesting to see what kind of fallout this decision may or may not have.

Apple Insider: 10.6 will be Intel-Only

OS X 10.6 – Snow Leopard

I’m sure everyone has already heard (news confirmed at Apple’s keynote travels faster than a bullet). But just in case, here’s the official page with info on Mac OS X 10.6, which is in fact named Snow Leopard.

A few of the rumors are as of yet unconfirmed although it’s looking like most of them will in fact turn out to be true.

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World Wildlife Fund

A fun new Freeware app for OS X has been released by BravoBug software. Karma is a personal utility for collecting positive energy on your Mac. It provides a Karma Jar which you can use to store daily tokens representing a positive event, thought, or deed that occurred during the day. Each token you deposit, in return, gives you a new quote, proverb, or poem to enjoy.

Karma is freeware and comes with over 100 quotes, proverbs, and poems from a variety of sources. Find out more, or download Karma for free, at the Karma page: Karma Webpage