Month: February 2012

OS X Mountain Lion – Improved Scanning and Printing

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Last week, Apple released details of OS X Mountain Lion, notice they dropped the “Mac” from the title, that was probably deliberate. Most of us will still call it Mac OS X 10.8. Anyways, while I know I will be sticking with VueScan for my scanning needs, it looks like … Read more

MacFamilyTree 6.2.5

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An update to MacFamilyTree, MacFamilyTree 6.2.5, has been released by Synium Software. It’s highly recommended for existing users – GEDCOM importing and exporting has been improved, syncing issues with MobileFamilyTree Pro, memory usage, and some minor user interface (UI) improvements. There is a release of MobileFamilyTree Pro, also developed by … Read more

Related Software Updates – Feb 16, 2012 Edition

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This marks the start of a weekly series, not always on the same day, where I’m going to cover software updates that maybe of interest to Mac-using genealogists.

VueScan 9.0.80 was released today. It’s scanning software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, and has been my preferred scanning software for several years. It handles a large amount of scanners and provides more features than most factory-default software that comes with your scanner. There is also an iOS version of VueScan (VueScan Mobile – Hamrick Software) that takes advantage of WiFi-enabled scanners to scan straight to your iOS device.
More information: Hamrick.com (VueScan website).

iPhoto Library Manager 3.7.3 was released yesterday, mainly covering bug fixes. iPhoto Library Manager is aptly named – it allows you to have multiple iPhoto libraries, rather than having everything contained within one iPhoto library. It also supports copying photos from one iPhoto library to another. I use it to keep track of photos from different branches of my family (and my wife’s family) as well as separate personal/family photos (vacation, holiday, etc.) from older genealogy-related photos. It supports Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher, and iPhoto 4.0.3 or higher. Handy for those using older Macs and older versions of iPhoto.
More information: Fat Cat Software

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Apple Announces Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

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Apple has announced Mac OS X 10.8, aka Mac OS X Mountain Lion today, or rather the developer preview of Mac OS X Mountain Lion, which is the ninth major release of Mac OS X (don’t forget Mac OS X 10.0! – I know we try to forget Mac OS X 10.0, but that was a long time ago). It brings in several features from its mobile iOS platform, including Messages (covered here), Notes, Reminders, Game Center, Notification Center, Share Sheets, Twitter integration and AirPlay mirroring. Mountain Lion also introduces Gatekeeper, which controls/helps secure your Mac. Gatekeeper provides “complete control over what apps are installed on your Mac“.

It’s being built with a focus on making iCloud integration easy to use and easy for developers to integrate with Mac OS X applications, allowing for easy access to your data between applications, as well as an online backup.

There is a lot going on with Mountain Lion, and I’ll be talking more about it as I take a look at the developer preview.

For now, I’m interested to see how well the iCloud integration is, and whether Mac genealogy software developers are able to better use it to provide an easy way to sync and share genealogy information between Mac OS X genealogy applications and genealogy apps on iOS devices. Apple is already doing things that benefits genealogists – easy backups with Time Capsule and iCloud, and pushing the idea of making your data available anywhere, without a lot of effort on your part. A lot of us have probably experienced the issue of losing data due to a computer crash in the past or just not being able to have easy access to our data/information away from our “main” computer or Mac.

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Apple Releases Messages Beta from Mac OS X Mountain Lion

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It may seem odd that I mention this first, but I want to get this out of the way. Messages Beta is the first application released to the general public from Apple’s Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Messages replaces iChat, but retains iChat’s services/information. More importantly, it unifies instant … Read more

GenSmarts for Mac OS X – We Need This

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Back in December, a call for beta testers was posted on the GenSmarts website. For those of you who have come over from the world of Windows-based genealogy, you may be familiar with GenMarts. If you’ve been a Mac genealogist for a longtime, or have never used GenSmarts, GenSmarts is … Read more