Hi! The last newsletter I sent out was in 2009, so you might have forgotten that Stick Software even exists. Sorry about that! I've been working on a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, which I completed this summer. That was keeping me quite busy, so I didn't do much with Stick Software for a long time.
Things are going to get busy for me again soon (I'm moving to France to do postdoctoral research there), but I've had a little time recently, and I've updated some apps to work with OS X 10.8. I've even added a few new features! So without further ado, here is what's new since October 2009:
PhotoReviewer is an image handling utility for people who juggle a lot of photos. If you have a digital camera, it's not uncommon to have hundreds or even thousands of images coming into your "inbox". You need to rename them, toss the bad ones, sort the good ones, email thumbnails to friends... you need an app that can help you with your photo workflow. Apple's iPhoto is a good long-term repository, but it isn't so good at that first stage of simply coping with the flood of incoming photos. Other apps tend to be overpriced, poorly designed, cluttered, and above all, slow. PhotoReviewer, on the other hand... well, I'll let my users speak for themselves:
Now PhotoReviewer 2.2 is compatible with OS X 10.6 and up. New features include display of over- and under-exposed pixels, improved side-by-side comparison of images (up to 36 at a time!), movable horizontal and vertical rules to check that your horizon is level, and automatic downscaling of reviewed images to make your reviews even faster (and take less memory). Version 2.2 is now a 64-bit app, making it possible to do even very large reviews easily and quickly. more...
Constrictor is a screen snapshot utility for OS X 10.7 and up (users on older OS X versions can always find old versions of our software at our software archive). It lets you position a frame over exactly the area you want to snap, and then lets you customize the snap image with effects like scaling, framing and feathering. You can copy your snapshots to the clipboard or save them to a file, and you can take snaps using hotkeys without interrupting your workflow. more...
Version 3.3 is a maintenance release; Constrictor had not been working well on recent OS X releases, and this new version fixes all those problems.
Fracture is a screensaver for OS X 10.6 and up that creates a wide variety of fractal images. (You can visit Stick Software's gallery to see some!) It is quite advanced for a screensaver — it will use multiple processors if you have them, will antialias its images, and can be controlled by the user while it is running. It's multimonitor-aware, and can show different fractals on each of your screens. It can even replace your desktop image with one of the beautiful fractals it creates, if you ask it to! more...
Version 1.7 is a maintenance release; Fracture had not been working well on recent OS X releases, and this new version fixes all those problems. It is also much faster than previous versions, thanks to a complete redesign of its display code. Show off the blazing speed of that new 12-core Mac Pro!
Eyeballs is a fun app for OS X 10.6 and up that gives you a pair of eyeballs in your menu bar or on your desktop. They watch your cursor while you work, and they have lots of personality. They're configurable, and you can choose from lots of skins supplied in the app — or make your own custom skin! more...
Version 3.3 is a maintenance release; Eyeballs had not been working well on recent OS X releases, and this new version fixes all those problems.
Jiggler is a freeware app for OS X 10.6 and up that keeps your computer awake through even the most boring tasks. It jiggles your mouse periodically and pokes OS X to keep it awake, so your computer doesn't fall asleep while it is playing a movie, showing a PowerPoint presentation, doing a big file copy, or whatever long, mindless task you might have set it to. No more having to open System Preferences to change your sleep time and your screensaver delay &mdash only to forget to change them back at the end! Jiggler can be configured to keep your Mac awake whenever particular things are happening (iTunes is playing, PowerPoint is running, etc.), or it can be set up to keep your machine awake for a set length of time using its Timed Quit feature. more...
Version 1.5 is partly a maintenance release, to keep Jiggler working well with current versions of OS X. However, it also adds a few new features:
If you'd like to hear about Stick Software news as soon as it happens, instead of waiting for the next newsletter, you might want to try the Stick Software RSS feed. This is the same kind of feed that is supplied by blogs and news websites and so forth; you can copy the link on the RSS icon above (right-click or control-click on it and select Copy Link) and paste it into the newsreader or blog aggregator of your choice (I use Feedly, personally, but Safari can handle RSS feeds in OS X 10.10, too).
Life is very busy for me these days; it's a lot of work trying to build a second career in academia! (If you're curious about this new life of mine, you can check out my academic home page.) But I haven't abandoned Stick Software, as you can see; I intend to keep it going as best I can, in what spare time I have. There are a few more apps that I'd like to dust off and get running again, such as Solarian II, Aquatint, and Trisection, but I don't know when that will happen. Stay tuned.
If you've got comments, bug reports, or anything else you'd like us to see, send a note at support@sticksoftware.com. Thanks for your support. I always enjoy hearing from happy users!
