MacRabbit releases Espresso 2.0

Following quick behind the launch of Analog this week, MacRabbit has released Espresso 2.0. This version of Espresso merges the previous Apple award-winning CSSEdit with Espresso 1.0, and introduces a swath of new features. Previously I really liked CSSEdit and Espresso 1 and used them extensively on a day-to-day basis for RapidWeaver theme and stack development. So to have both apps merged together as one makes sense to me. The user interface in this latest version of Espresso remains fantastic, and there are plenty of options to satisfy both novice web developers and seasoned professionals.

Purchasing Espresso 2 will cost you $79. That may seem a little steep, but one web development project would easily cover that cost. Existing Espresso or CSSEdit users can benefit from very generous upgrade discounts as well. Altogether Espresso 2 offers a fantastic application for web developers, a beautiful interface and is brimming with professional features for getting jobs done quicker.

MacRabbit website: http://macrabbit.com/

RapidMaps plugin on special offer today

RapidMaps is today's featured MacZot, selling for $6.99 instead of the normal price of $14.95. A very useful plugin to use in RapidWeaver, wherever you want to display a map. It uses Google Maps, so you don't have to worry about sub-licensing maps from other companies. Remarkably simple to setup and the interface is much easier to work with, compared with competing stacks.

RapidMaps is a RapidWeaver plugin that lets you add Google Maps to your site in a few clicks. Just center your map, fill in your Google API Key and publish!

MacZot website: http://maczot.com/
RapidMaps: http://www.omnidea.it/rapidmaps/

Analog released by Realmac Software

A superb little image editor I've been Beta testing for the past few months got released today. It's called Analog and is developed by Realmac Software, the same company behind other prestigious software titles like RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper and Courier. Analog is a remarkably simple application that lets you to drag and drop images into a placeholder and choose from a range of professional looking filters and frame effects. Then these processed images can be saved locally on your hard drive, attached to an email or published to various online 'clouds' like Flickr, Picasa or Facebook for the world to see.

Do we need yet another Mac-exclusive image editor? Well put yourself in my position. Two weeks ago I shot over 1000 photographs on my 2 year-old Sony A350 DSL, only to find later on in iPhoto that the camera had developed a fault, and I had white over-exposed bands running across the bottom third of my pictures. While I battle with the paper trail at Sony UK to have my camera repaired for less than the quoted £300, it left me with the problem of what to do with these imperfect images. Rather than trash the entire shoot, I tried several of them through Analog. In quite a number of examples, it turned the bad images into 'artistically refined' images. So it was great to find a way to recycle less-than-perfect pictures. Likewise I had a mess around with some of the effects in Analog, and found that it gave me some inspirational ideas for future creative projects. Even if you drop in a picture taken on a 1MB camera phone, the finished image is pretty impressive.