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Softpedia Recommended Mac Apps of the Week - 05.07.2008Almost every program you could ever need also has its free counterpart |
By Filip Truta, Apple News Editor
5th of July 2008, 13:03 GMT
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Hello and welcome back to Mac Apps of the Week. We've got some pretty exciting pieces of software for you this week (all free), especially this hefty plugin which allows you to chat with the visitors to your website, ON your website, through an IM client. Check it out!
Hab.la
Designed specifically for webmasters, Hab.la is a free widget that integrates with IM clients like iChat, Adium and Meebo (which support Jabber / XMPP protocols), and lets you chat with the visitors to your website.
Installing Hab.la is easy. Just double click the installer to run it, follow the on-screen instructions to add Hab.la to your iChat or Adium client, place the Hab.la code on your website and open iChat or Adium and start chatting with visitors. However, placing the Hab.la code on your website requires an additional set of steps to follow. Here's what you need to do.
1- Before you can set up Hab.la with your IM client, you will be required to
sign up for a Hab.la account.
2- Next up, you will need to add Hab.la to your instant messenger - download a small helper application to setup Hab.la with your favorite instant messaging program or if you prefer the do-it-yourself approach, try one of Hab.la Group's detailed tutorials.
iChat Tutorial
Adium Tutorial
(tutorials for Meebo and other IM clients are also available).
3- Put Hab.la on your website: you will be given a code which you must add to each page where you would like the hab.la chat box to appear (by default, the Hab.la chat box will float in the lower right corner of your browser).
You will be given a Hab.la Site ID, after which your visitors' messages will start showing up in your IM app of choice. When a visitor comes to your web page, the Hab.la chat box is minimized in the lower right corner of the browser. If you're signed in to your IM client, the box will read "click to chat." (If you're not signed in, the box will read "not available").
When the visitors click the Hab.la title bar, a small chat box opens for them. All they have to do is type and press enter, just like they would with any IM client they use with their friends.
The Hab.la Group also lets you customize the appearance and functionality of your Hab.la widget. You mau choose the corner where you want your Hab.la widget to appear, customize the way your offline and online messages appear, choose to start window expanded, expand on the first message, expand on all messages, disable plugins like Google Analytics, enable autotranslating of conversations using Google Translate. (You must also add additional javascript to your page for this feature to work), and even translate conversations into this language when Google translate is enabled (supported language codes: en, zh, zh-CN, zh-TW, ar, fr, de, it, ja, ko, pt-PT, ru, es, nl).
Hab.la calls for Mac OS X 10.3 or later, Adium 1.2 or later, or iChat 3 or later.
NOTE: Hab.la is currently in. The development team is constantly making improvements, but if you need help on a specific issue and can't find in the Help Section, try using the Hab.la Forum.
Click HERE to download Hab.la now.
Lustro
Lustro "mirrors" all your Address Book contacts to a bunch of different formats or services, overwrites all your Google Contacts with the ones in your Address Book and can create one file with a contact per line while a comma separates the different contact details. So if you always need your contacts everywhere you go, and must use different systems, Lustro can export your Address Book contacts to comma separated values, tab separated values and even hCards.
The application manages to "mirror" all your Address Book contacts to different formats or services. As soon as you select a format Lustro will prompt you to choose the name and location to save the file exports (CSV, tab delimited and hCard). Formats supported by Lustro include:
CSV or Comma Separated Values: Lustro creates one file with a contact per line and a comma separates the different contact details. As a a way to store tabular data, this format dates back to the early days of business computing, which means you can practically get this on any system today.
Tab delimited: this format only looks like CSV. It does sport an extra, though. tabs!
hCard or HTML vCard: this respective format is actually a microformat. You can use it to publish your contacts details in HTML. Lustro can achieve this for you by creating a single XHTML file with all your contacts as hCards. If you need to publish contact details on websites in a semantic way, you may very well use this format.
Google Contacts: if you're a user of Google Contacts, you can choose Overwrite with Google Contacts from Lustro's window and it will slap them over the ones in your Address Book. This helps because you can use your Address Book contacts in any Google Contacts enabled web app, such as Gmail. The Google export will be exported to Google directly.
Developers Jelle Vandebeeck and Simon Schoeters point out that, while Lustro does its bit, there are some Address Book-supported formats where Lustro can be left out. Those are the vCard a standard file format for electronic business cards compatible with most address book applications and e-mail clients (address Book can create a vCard for a single person or a single vCard with multiple contacts) and Address Book Archive, which exports all your contacts to a single file that can be imported in Address Book at any time. This also acts as a good backup solution for your contacts, as it also supports exporting group information too.
Lustro can still include the Google Contacts export, if you enable Address Book syncing with Exchange, Yahoo!, MobileMe, and Google, as the Address Book syncing only works if you have connected an iPhone or iPod Touch before and the syncing mechanism is not perfect at the time of writing.
Lustro is free and a Universal Binary, which means it is compatible with PowerPC Macs, as well as Intel-based machines. Lustro is licensed and providede under the terms of the MIT License. Click HERE to download the software now.
QSynergy
Qsynergy is a mere graphical front end for Mac OS X users looking to make good use of Synergy, an application that lets one user control multiple systems using a single mouse and keyboard.
While MS Windows users already benefit from a hefty GUI (graphical user interface) without needing to install more software, developer Volker Lanz decided to write up Qsynergy to fill the gap for users on Mac OS X and Unix platforms.
For those who've never used or even heard of Synergy before, it is a truly powerful remote controlling tool that lest you share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers, even with different operating systems. Naturally, each computer must have its own its own display, but other than that, all you need is Synergy, one mouse and one keyboard. The software is aimed at users with multiple computers on their desk.
Using Synergy, one can simply move the mouse cursor off the edge of a screen and it will instantly appear on the next, in the direction the person moves it. The free software is also capable of merging clipboards across all systems, which means you may copy something on one, and paste on another.
As if it wasn't great enough, Synergy also synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together. As you would imagine, only one screen requires a password to unlock them all, should screen locking is enabled.
With Qsynergy, you can benefit from all the above mentioned features through an easy to use, yet comprehensive, graphical interface. After installing the software, you can access all of synergy's powerful features without having to edit a configuration file, run Synergy as client or server, run Synergy with an existing configuration or create your own, drag and drop screens into place to set up your configuration, and more.
NOTE: If the downloaded binary fails to run on your system you will have to build QSynergy from sources using the XCode developer tools, following these steps:
1- open a Terminal window
2- navigate to the qsynergy directory and run "qmake" from the command-line
3- open a Finder window with the qsynergy folder
4- double click on the just created QSynergy.xcodeproj file to be able to open it with Xcode.
5- click on the "Build ang Go" Xcode menu button and the app will be built
Developer Volker Lanz also claims that the Mac OS X port of Synergy is incomplete. It doesn't synchronize the screen saver. Only text clipboard data works. HTML and bitmap data do not work. Also, the cursor won't hide when not on the screen, and there may be problems with mouse wheel acceleration at times.
The requirements for using Qsynergy are a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or later and Qt4 and Xcode, to be able to build the app from source in case the downloaded binary fails to start.
QSynergy is available HERE as a free download. Synergy is also free, and awaiting to be downloaded HERE.
If you find any of these three pieces of software useful, don't hold back from dropping us a line. See you next week.
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