Software

Heredis 2.2.0 and ohmiGeneLite 5.37.0 Released

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Heredis, which is still on sale in the Mac App Store for $38.99, has received an update that improves GEDCOM import/export. Heredis 2.2.0 Changes: – Improvement of the Gedcom import/export – Other improvements Heredis was originally going to only be on sale through June 9, 2013. If you have the … Read more

Snapheal 2.0 Released, 60% Off Sale

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Snapheal 2.0 has been released, and this is a major update/upgrade over previous versions of Snapheal. It’s also on sale for 60% – $7.99 US (limited time) in the Mac App Store – Snapheal – Fix your photos. – MacPhun LLC.

Snapheal is a Mac OS X app that helps repair damaged photos (among other things). It can fix creases, tears, other unwanted objects and damage.

I have not used Snapheal, but for $7.99, I’m tempted to pick it up and try it out. I use a combination of Akvis Retoucher and Adobe Photoshop, which is an expensive combination. For those on a budget, Snapheal + iPhoto could get you a lot of the way there, depending on your goals, and Snapheal works with both iPhoto and Aperature – images can be imported from both, and then exported to both, as well as Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom.

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Evernote 3.1.1 Released for Macs

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Evernote 3.1.0 and now 3.1.1 have been released. Evernote 3.1.1 is labeled as build 248775, and it’s a very significant release in this popular cross-platform note-taking and journaling software. A lot of genealogists use Evernote – you can access and add to the data on your Macs, iPhones, iPads, and … Read more

Genealogy Tools – Index of Family Tree Maker Tutorials

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Ben over at Genealogy Tools has put together a full index of the of all of the Family Tree Maker tutorials he has assembled. These cover Family Tree Maker 2010 for Mac and Family Tree Maker for Mac 2, as well as the Windows versions – Family Tree Maker 2009, … Read more

Non-Genealogy Software Updates – Feb 23, 2012 Edition

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Following in the footsteps of last week non-genealogy software updates (Feb 16, 2012 Edition), the following is a list of recent software updates that may be of interest to Mac-using genealogists.

VueScan Version 9.0.81 has been released.
VueScan is scanning software that supports a large number of scanners (and it’s what I use). Version 9.0.81 has fixes for Plustek, PIE, and Reflecta scanners, and addresses an issue with option changes and the scroll wheel.
More information: Hamrick.com (VueScan website).

ExactScan version 2.19.3
ExactScan is also scanning software, however it is focused on document scanning, including as an example, support for document scanners that handle 60 and 120 pages per minute. It supports over 200 document scanners (Avision, Kodak, Oki, Visioneer, Xerox, Canon, Fujitsu, and others, including many that do not have support for Mac OS X from the manufacturer.

There are two versions, both available through the App Store
– ExactScan – ExactCODE
– ExactScan Pro – ExactCODE

ExactScan Pro offers the ability to do Optical Character Recognition (OCR) directly to PDF (in a searchable format), “Imprinter” to print text into the scanned image, barcode recognition to file stacks by barcodes, and batch processing of existing image files.

WordPerfect Spotlight and Quick Look Plug-ins Version 3.6 (February 18, 2012)
This is a set of two plugins that do what they describe – they enabled Spotlight search and Quick Look thumbnails/previews for documents and graphics files created by any version of WordPerfect running on any operating system from WordPerfect 1.0 up through WordPerfect 11. They will even pass information such as the document format/WordPerfect version and whether a file is encrypted (password protected).

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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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