8.7.7 - Imagewell 2.0, build 225
Imagewell takes on the tasks of extremely common image adjustment, editing and transfer that a webmaster or blogger does time and time again, and puts these tasks into an efficient, minimalist, yet extremely clever working tool kit. Imagewell is also a small application, so it doesn't take much HD space and it starts very quickly, something I definitely appreciate as I'm working with a Mac mini, which isn't exactly the end-all and be-all of Mac hot-rods.
Every once in a while, I have the good fortune to stumble over something that is so well designed, it just leaves me flabbergasted. Imagewell is precisely that. Don't be fooled by the minimal appearance of the window over there on the right; One of Imagewell's key strengths is that you see only what you need to see as you work, and what you see there is only the watermark management interface. There are several others, each populated with tools according to the task at hand.
Features: Imagewell can clip, drop-shadow, border, stylishly crop, apply text, apply text balloons (thought and speech balloons) resize (scale), adjust quality (with preview of the effect this has), convert (for instance, drag a tiff into Imagewell, but upload a jpeg to the target site), do screen grabs, and rotate images. When you're satisfied with the image, clicking one button sends the image to the webserver where it is destined to be used.
If you are in the position, as I am, of having to manage images for upload and subsequent presentation on one or more web sites, zip on over to xtralean (linked below) and grab yourself a copy of Imagewell. Take a half hour or so to explore what it can do, and then ask yourself how much time this little jewel will save you. In my case, it'll cut down the number of times I have to open the Gimp, or Photoshop, by several orders of magnitude. Repeated iterations of screen-grabbing, scaling, cropping, watermarking and uploading are so common for me that I would estimate Imagewell will save me as much as 1/2 an hour to an hour a day — time is not only money, it cannot be replaced once spent.
I had occassion to contact technical support, via their forum. I found their technical support to be excellent. They were very, very quick to respond to me, got to the heart of my issues immediately, and solved one problem (which was entirely cockpit error on my part, frankly, not their fault at all) with patience and in detail. For another issue, they gave me a 100% effective workaround. We're talking about responses measured in minutes here, not hours. In the middle of a working day. Awesome.
I was able to think of a few things I would like to see in Imagewell, and the developers received my suggestions courteously, and again, they replied with just a few minutes of my making them. You can't beat that.
Imagewell, for technical reasons associated with the use of the *nix utility curl, presumes you are working with directories relative to the home directory that your ftp server drops you into when you are logged in. For me, this was a problem, because our many web sites are not located on paths that can be reached relative to the home directory. The workaround from xtralean was to prefix the particular upload path with ../../ which takes the current directory from the /home/whomever directory backwards to the root of the *nix filesystem, and then allows building the path from there. Imagewell (well, curl, actually, though this is invisible to the user) would not let me use an actual absolute path, that is, one that begins with / so unless I could get down to the root fo the filesystem somehow, I'd have been stuck putting softlinks to the targets in my home directory, which I didn't want to do. So if you are in the same type of situation, that's how you solve it. No sweat!
Imagewell is free.
Five out of five stars.
Link: Imagewell
8.7.8 - Intaglio 2.3
Intaglio is a powerful, yet extremely easy to use drawing program for Mac OSX.
Features: Unicode support, a broad selection of drawing tools, groups, alignment, masking, layers, Applescript, considerably more.
You can download Intaglio and try it before buying; a watermark will appear on any output you print and you can't save your document in Intaglio's format, which means you shouldn't get too involved with the software before you buy it. I did, and I was forced to buy it before I could quit so I could register the software and save my work. Why? I was just going to try it. Really. But before I knew it, I was several hours into a complex, multi-language drawing. I really needed to save it! The good news is, buy it, register it, and you can save without quitting and losing your work. First they tricked me by making the software so engaging; then they saved me by allowing the registration to upgrade a running copy. Kudos to Purgatory Design!
Intaglio is $89.00 (US.)
Five out of five stars.
Link: Intaglio
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